What is it with 30-something Québécois filmmakers and their interest in exploring the tired porn trope of dissatisfied wives who get their sexual needs met by hot handmen? 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 chloe robichaud (“Sarah Loves to Run”) Enters the Sundance World Dramatic Competition”two women,
Screenwriter Catherine Léger had previously adapted the material into a successful stageplay, but the theater version includes some bracing irony, a quality missing from this earnest, naturalistic misfire. The best that can be said for Robichaud’s film is that his 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 screams space. Translator Florence (Gonthier-Hyndman) and new mother Violette (Leboeuf) are neighbors. For both of them, motherhood has brought about some mental health issues. They bond over their unsatisfactory sex life and eventually decide to do something about it.
We learn that it’s been years since restless, dark-haired Florence fell in love with her boyfriend David (Mani Souleymanlou), a bored tech nerd who mirrors the effort behind Coop’s greenhouse. It’s perhaps also a trifle on the nose that his 10-year-old son Max (Mateo Laurent Menbreno Degle) keeps a captive hamster, also named Florence, who ate his offspring. 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 perhaps the funniest line of the film (giving an idea of the level of humor on display), he tells her, “Our relationship works best when one of us is on antidepressants.”
Beautiful blonde Violet is equally suffering from the state of her bedroom. 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 cawing crows. Or, perhaps some instinct is telling her that hubby Benoit (Felix Moti), a smarmy pharmaceutical salesman, is cheating on her with his coworker Ellie (Juliet Gariepy) at every convention he can attend.
When a hunky worker from the Angels mounts a ladder to seek the source of Violet’s mysterious noises, both he and Florence take an inappropriate interest in her back. After Florence explains that monogamy was invented for men, the stage is set for a string of hired workers who receive an unexpected bonus when women fuck them in crude, non-funny scenes. Seduces with a high cringe factor.
Why remake a sex comedy with a feminist gaze if you can’t be bothered to give the lead female characters some backbone? It is mentioned that Violet is eventually going back to work, but that is not all she does. Instead, many views are attributed to his wacky habit of posting too much information on Facebook. Florence, ever the reader, gets to tout some feminist theory about sexual energy, but when she eventually puts her life on a new track, we don’t even get to see it. It’s strange when the most independent, modern, sexually liberated female character, Ellie, appears to have a relationship with the woman Benoit is.
Some of the film’s other assets are the charming 35mm cinematography by Sara Mishara (“Viking”), which opens the housebound action with night-time flashes in Montreal, commuter trains and children at play.
