Two Women

55 years after Robert Fournier scored a box office hit with a sex comedy about two dissatisfied married women who start having casual sex with repair men, delivery boys etc (it’s still one of the most successful Quebecois films ever made), director Chloé Robichaud and playwright Catherine Léger have revisited and revised the material for our own times.

Violette (Laurence Leboeuf) and Florence (Karine Gonthier-Hyndman) are neighbours in a Montreal apartment complex. Both are married. Neither is getting the attention they crave from their respective spouses. Benoit (Felix Moati) is having an affair with a colleague (Juliette Gariépy). David (Mani Soleymanou) just isn’t feeling it. Fortunately for our heroines, there are many more fish in the sea…

Two Women doesn’t aim too deep; it just wants to show us a good time and score some points about women’s sexuality along the way. Confidently guided by Chloé Robichaud and featuring winning performances from Gonthier-Hyndman and Laboeuf, this it effortlessly accomplishes.

Two Women brings a female sensibility to a classic farce as the title characters find that the key to happiness could lie in the joy of casual sex… its reflections on modern relationships are engagingly comical, cynical and ultimately tender.

Allan Hunter, Screen Daily

It’s a “sex comedy” in the way that films from the 1960s and ’70s used to be called “sex comedies.” Perhaps slightly more explicit and definitely more feminist, but thoroughly goofy in its exploration of the proclivities of the title characters. Neil Simon would be proud. Robichaud’s camera has a deep love for her two heroines, Violette and Florence. Although they are both spiraling in their own way, she films them with care, often bathed in sunlight. And while the sex scenes are intentionally silly in their conceit, there’s also a genuine sexiness to them.

Esther Zuckerman, IndieWire

A frothy, sexy, thoroughly hilarious comedy about that eternal seven-year itch.

Mary E Gates, rogerebert.com