What is it with 30-something filmmakers from Quebec and their interest in exploring the tired porn trope of unsatisfied wives who find their sexual needs met by Hot Handymen? In 2023, Monia Chokri’s “The Nature of Love” was selected for Cannes, and even won the César for Best Foreign Language Film. Now, Helmer Chloé Robichaud (“Sarah Prefers to Run”) enters Sundance World drama competition with “Two Women,” an unconvincing remake of the cult 1970 Québec Sex Romp, “Deux Femmes en or.”
Catherine Léger, the screenwriter-producer, had previously adapted the material into a successful stage game, but the stage version seems to have included some irony, a quality missing from this serious, natural misfire. The best that can be said for Robichaud’s film is that its leads, Karen Günter Hindman and Laurence Leboeuf, give committed performances.
The action takes place mostly in an ugly suburban barn in Montreal ecology, where the cramped interior screams confinement. Translator Florence (Günter Hindemann) and new mother Violet (Leboeuf) are neighbors. For both of them, motherhood seems to have brought some mental health issues. They relate to their unsatisfactory sex life and finally decide to do something about it.
We learn that it’s been years since the restless, dark-haired Florence was in love with her boyfriend David (Manny Solimanloo), a tech nerd who heads the effort behind the Coop’s greenhouse. It may also be that Florence is kept by her 10-year-old son Max (Mateo Laurent Menbreño Daigle), who ate her offspring. Human Florence has been on antidepressants for years, but she still remembers the times “before” when it was wild and fun. When she decided to get off her meds, David decided to start taking them. In what may be the film’s funniest line (giving an idea of the level of humor on display), he tells her, “Our relationship works better when one of us is on antidepressants.”
Petite Blonde Violette is equally affected by 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’s just crows. Or maybe some instinct tells her that hubby Benoit (Félix Moati), a gorgeous pharmaceutical salesman, is cheating on her with his co-worker Eli (Juliette Gariépy) at every conference he can attend.
When a brilliant Angels of Annihilation worker installs a ladder to search for the source of Violet’s mysterious noise, both she and Florence take an undue interest in his ass. After Florence explains that monogamy was invented for men, the stage is set for a series of hired hands who get an unexpected bonus when they seduce women in raw, uncrowded scenes with a big-time worker.
Why would you aspire to remake a sex comedy with a feminist outlook if you don’t even bother giving the main female characters some backbone? It was stated that Violette would eventually return to work, but what that was was not revealed. Instead, many scenes are given over to her strange habit of posting too much information on Facebook. Florence, ever the reader, gets some feminist theory about sexual energy, but when she finally sets her life on a new path, we don’t even get to see it. It’s strange when the most independent, modern, sexually free female character seems to be Ellie, and the woman Benoit suffers from a relationship with her.
Among the few other assets in the film is the engaging 35mm cinematography by Sarah Mishara (“Viking”), which opens the homeward-bound action with reckless nighttime glimpses of Montreal, commuter trains, and children at play.