Director: Thea Sharrock
Writer: Natalie Krinsky, Cinco Paul, Katie Silberman
Stars: Sacha Baron Cohen, Rosamund Pike, Tom Davis
Synopsis: A male chauvinist is transported to a matriarchal society, facing challenges from a formidable female version of himself.
For a film diving into the prospects of a female-dominated society, Thea Sharrock’s Ladies First takes the most basic approach to the concept. Filled with lazy sight gags, zero thematic insight, and no performance worth remembering, it’s an impressively terrible film.
The general conceit of the film revolves around male chauvinist Damien Sachs (Sacha Baron Cohen) who hits his head and wakes up in a society where women are the dominant gender. Is the world in any way different besides women being in charge everywhere and an obvious female gaze everywhere? Nope. Everything else is exactly the same. Women in positions of power use sex and manipulation in order to get what they want. Men are ignored while their abilities are overlooked, valued only for their appearance and sex appeal.
When I watch a film directed by a woman, there are often obvious differences you can see through the filmmaking process. Women generally are not objectified, gender norms are pushed beyond expectations, and different perspectives are explored. Ladies First is one of the first films seen with a female director and a mostly female writing team where it felt like it was created by a man…an untalented man.
Instead of having anything interesting to say, the film defaults to: “What if we kept everything men do awful, but with women” as the premise. Beer ads feature scantily-clad men, women are in the workforce while men stay at home, and women dress more covered while men dress more revealing. There’s nothing interesting in that approach. It’s just a one-for-one substitution of a pre-existing idea. It’s like someone wanted to remake Jaws, but it’s one human attacking a quiet beach town of sharks. The idea doesn’t explain or expand ideas, it’s just plain lazy.
The few attempts at broad humor land on Cohen to be as broad as humanly possible. For a performer who has made a career of taking big chances in spontaneous situations, his performance is antithetical to what he does well. He is measured, attempting to be suave, all the while unwilling to be seen as too preposterous. He’ll go along with the joke, but there is no commitment to the bit. He is a turd at the beginning of the film, and you just know he will eventually see the error of his ways.
On the opposite end of Damien is Alex (Rosamund Pike), a talented but unheralded underling in the standard world, and the CEO in-waiting in the female-dominant one. We barely get to see what Alex is like to give her any sort of rooting interest. Instead, Alex is just as unlikeable as Damien, while Damien himself doesn’t really change for the first hour of the film. Instead of giving anyone for the audience to cling to, you get two highly unlikeable and unpleasant characters front and center in your movie.
There is a version of Ladies First where you could actually say something interesting about a female-dominated world. The possibilities are endless. Instead of landing on anything thematically interesting, or even zeroing in on a specific male shortfall, the film just keeps hammering the same one-note joke of “sexism is bad” over and over again. Once you realize there is no insight coming, your brain shuts down and settles in for the inevitable conclusion. It feels like the filmmakers didn’t want to put in the effort to make a grander statement.
The entire cast is wasted in preposterous situations or underwhelming roles. Cohen is grossly miscast, unable to do anything he does well. Pike is fun as the sexist boss, but it quickly devolves into petty shouting matches and insults. Talented performers like Fiona Shaw, Kathryn Hunter, Charles Dance, and Emily Mortimer equally have little substance to their characters and are unable to transcend the script’s limitations. Only Richard E. Grant seems to elevate his character, but he’s a homeless man covered in pigeons, so that says a lot. Ladies First is one of the lazier streaming films to come out in some time, with nothing to say and with no interesting way to say it. It would be a disaster if it was worth remembering.
