Two Women Review: Sex and the Married Woman

The last couple of decades of sex comedies, especially those emanating from Hollywood, have rarely felt like they were made for or by adults. That’s definitely not true of the delightfully thoughtful and unapologetically horny Two Women.

An updating of sorts of director Claude Fournier’s 1970 saucy romp Deux femmes en or (Two Women in Gold), it’s far from a note-for-note revival. The underlying idea is still there, of two neighbors who egg each other on to extramarital sexual escapades with visiting tradesmen while their clueless husbands are oblivious or engaged in their own dalliances. However, the new script by Catherine Léger (Slut in a Good Way) cuts out the more farcical elements of the original by Fournier and Marie-José Raymond: Gone is one of the women accidentally screwing one of her lovers to death and the bizarre happy ending where the pair end up Broadway stars. Instead, Léger and director Chloé Robichaud swap the silliness for something more mundane and sometimes mournful.

Born of the sexual revolution finally making it to suburban Quebec, Fournier’s original had an “of course you can have it all” energy that is clearly absent from this reinvention. The story is relocated from the tract housing developments of the 1970s to a modern eco co-op apartment building, where neighbors Violette (Laurence Leboeuf) and Florence (Karine Gonthier-Hyndman) share a wall and nothing else. Stuck home with a young baby while her pharmaceutical rep husband, Benoit (Félix Moati, Livid), is on the road, Violette is increasingly frustrated by the sound of the neighbor’s pet raven caw-caw-caw-ing through the wall. Of course, the older Florence doesn’t have a pet raven: She does have a partner, David (Mani Soleymanlou), who is more interested in the co-op’s communal greenhouse than her carnal needs, and she’s papering over the cracks in her life with antidepressants.

The source of that strange sound is just one of the new narrative elements in Léger’s more social realist screenplay, which is much more of a character study than the original. Violette and Florence are far more nuanced characters, especially in how Gonthier-Hyndman navigates the underlying question of Florence’s mental health. The audience must question how much her newfound sexual boldness is linked to the shadows of a self-destructive streak – a stark contrast to the implication that Violette is striking back at the extended periods of abandonment by Benoit.

Yet Léger also has empathy for the husbands and recontextualizes their characters for modern Quebec. Benoit is no longer a cartoonishly manly man, off hunting with his own lover, but instead wracked with guilt about his affair with a colleague. Similarly, David is less of a simpering milksop, and Soleymanlou brings out a sense of desperation without ever making him seem like a victim.

Léger and Robichaud’s update is mostly successful in filtering the intent of the original for modern sensibilities, not least in the plentiful sex scenes. Fournier’s Playboy sensibilities are gone, replaced by a semi-softcore intimacy and more equal time for male and female nudity.

The most pointed differences between the versions of this story are clearest in the details, like how one shared scene of Florence flashing a worker fixing a streetlight plays out. A one-note joke in the original, here it becomes one of the most important psychological beats for the character. It’s a scene that shows the difference in intention between the two films: Fournier and Raymond thought that the wives were happy with their lives and just needed a little slap-and-tickle on their own terms. Léger and Robichaud see Violette and Florence’s thank u, next adventures as a reaction to the underlying problems in their lives, a sensation that only grows from the initial image of the two women, staring out of the windows of their apartments, unaware of each other and their shared despair. That the women have a parade of basically anonymous men traipse through their homes and their beds with no hint of sexual violence allows the filmmakers to concentrate on what it is that they want and need without male desire being a factor.

Yet in between these eternally relevant observations and the insightful performances, Two Women can seem a little slight, like how the raven plotline seems to suddenly dead-end. It’s also still all predicated on the idea that every burly and rough-handed laborer will drop his tools and drop his trousers at the merest sight of bored bourgeois panties. That’s a conceit that Fournier and Raymond tried but arguably failed to liberate from male gaze sex comedies of the Sixties and Seventies. Léger and Robichaud undoubtedly drag the story further away from those salacious roots, even if their tragicomic version is never quite as sure whether it wants to laugh or cry.

Two Women

2025, NR, 100 min. Directed by Chloé Robichaud. Starring Laurence Leboeuf, Karine Gonthier-Hyndman, Félix Moati, Mani Soleymanlou.

⭐⭐⭐

Rating: 3 out of 5.

Two Women is screening exclusively at AFS Cinema; see website for showtimes.

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