It occurred to me while watching Halina Reijn’s extramarital transgression melodrama that it might not have worked as effectively as it does if an actor other than Nicole Kidman weren’t playing the main transgressor. With her reputation as a Hollywood superstar she injects a subtext of power into her character, a successful CEO who within the context of the story is considered a role model for female entrepreneurs. In the opening scene, she gets it on with her handsome, loving husband (played by Antonio Banderas, who was obviously chosen for his own extra-curricular baggage) in order to show that she doesn’t necessarily “have it all,” to use the cliche normally attached to women who enjoy both lucrative careers and solid marriages/families. Without Kidman to anchor this idea (Was it Steve Martin who made that joke about how Kidman is in every movie and TV show right now?) the film itself might have been received as little more than a kinky soap opera.

Kidman’s Romy is the founder of a robotics company who embarks on an affair with a young intern, Samuel (Harris Dickinson), who seems to have her number from the get go. Since we already understand that she fakes orgasms with her husband, we’re set up to intuit how Romy will respond to Samuel’s flirtations masked as genuflections to the differences in class and age that separate them. It’s these differences that Reijn wants to highlight, but the need to spice things up by making Samuel into an opportunistic predator often gets in the way of the social implications. If D.J. Lawrence did it more convincingly, it’s because the class distinctions between Lady Chatterley and Mellors were definitive. Reijn has to contend with the audience’s automatic repugnance of de facto class delineation. Like Mellors, Samuel asserts control through his use of the kind of sexual experience that Romy either doesn’t possess or has forgotten in her rush to the top of industry. Samuel is dominant, it’s implied, because Romy just can’t help herself once she’s gotten a taste. In that sense, the sex on screen is both liberating and highly stimulating, since Reijn and the actors serve it up straight. But in the end, the affair, and Romy’s desperate attempts to keep it under wraps, overwhelms everything else she does: It’s when the sex gets in the way of her work and leaves her exposed to blackmail, rather than interferes with her family life, that things start to fall apart.

Which is to say that social transgressions are more self-destructive than connubial ones. With or without Kidman, I could appreciate Reijn’s insistence that the kind of unfettered sex that Romy and Samuel partake of has no real bearing on the other aspects of their lives if left to their own devices, but that only means sex cannot be separated from one’s life in any way. Romy’s debasement in front of her so-called inferior, as exemplified by the title, is less of a thing than the notion that she is ruining all she’s worked for just to have a bit of nooky, which is not a particularly original idea, but one that Reijn puts across with a provocative freshness. 

Opens March 28 in Tokyo at Toho Cinemas Nihonbashi (050-6868-5060) Toho Cinemas Hibiya (050-6868-5068), Toho Cinemas Shinjuku (050-6868-5063), Shibuya Cine Quinto (03-3477-5905), Toho Cinemas Roppongi Hills (050-6868-5024).

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