What is it with 30-something Quebecoise filmmakers and their interest in exploring the tired porn trope of unsatisfied wives finding their sexual needs met by hot handymen? In 2023, Monia Chokri’s OK dramedy “The Nature of Love” was selected for Cannes and even won a César for best foreign film. Now, helmer Chloé Robichaud (“Sara Prefers to Run”) enters the Sundance World Dramatic competition with “Two Women,” a cringy, unconvincing remake of a cult 1970 Québec sex romp, “Deux femmes en or.”
Screenwriter-producer Catherine Léger earlier adapted the material into a successful stageplay, but the theater version seems to have included some bracing irony, a quality sorely missing from this earnest, naturalistic misfire. The best that can be said for Robichaud’s film is that her two leads, Karine Gonthier-Hyndman and Laurence Leboeuf, give committed performances
The action mostly takes place in an ugly, suburban Montreal eco-housing coop, where the cramped interior spaces scream confinement. Translator Florence (Gonthier-Hyndman) and new mother Violette (Leboeuf) are neighbors. For both of them, maternity seems to have brought some mental health issues. They bond over their unsatisfying sex lives and ultimately decide to do something about it.
We learn that it’s been years since restless, dark-haired Florence made love with her boyfriend David (Mani Soleymanlou), a boring tech nerd who spearheads the effort behind the coop’s greenhouse. It’s perhaps a trifle too on-the-nose that her 10-year-old son Max (Mateo Laurent Menbreño Daigle) keeps a caged hamster, also called Florence, who ate her offspring. The human Florence has been on antidepressants for years, but still remembers the “before” times when she was wild and fun. When she decides to go off her meds, David decides to start taking them. In what is perhaps the film’s funniest line (giving an idea of the level of humor on display), he tells her, “Our relationship works best when one of us is on antidepressants.”
Petite blonde Violette is equally aggrieved with her bedroom situation. Left alone all day with her baby, she feels as if she hears the sounds of people having loud sex … or maybe it is just crows cawing. Or, perhaps some instinct is telling her that hubby Benoit (Félix Moati), a smarmy pharmaceutical salesman, is cheating on her with his co-worker Eli (Juliette Gariépy) at every convention that he can attend.
When a hunky worker from the Angels of Extermination mounts a ladder to look for the source of Violette’s mysterious noise, both she and Florence take an undue interest in his backside. After Florence explains that monogamy was invented for men, the stage is set for a string of hired workers who get an unexpected bonus when the women seduce them in crude, non-funny scenes with a high cringe factor.
Why aspire to remake a sex comedy with a feminist gaze if you don’t even bother to give the main female characters some backbone? It’s mentioned that Violette will eventually be going back to work, but what she does isn’t revealed. Instead, several scenes are given over to her wacky habit of posting too much info on Facebook. Florence, ever the reader, gets to spout some feminist theory about sexual energy, but when she ultimately puts her life on a new track, we don’t even get to see it. It’s weird when the most independent, modern, sexually free female character seems to be Eli, the woman Benoit is having an affair with.
Among the film’s few other assets is the attractive 35mm cinematography by Sara Mishara (“Viking”), which opens up the housebound action with glittering night-time glimpses of Montreal, commuter trains and kids at play.