Chivalry is very much not dead in the modern world: just look at the title of Thea Sharrock’s latest, and be impressed by the double entendre it’s unknowingly gunning for: as snobby courtesy and, well, the coronation of the sacred matriarchy. But this is not to say that it is alive and kicking. If anything, the Netflix algorithm — through which the largely modern, largely American medium of the Internet age fashions and replicates itself — takes a very apolitical stance toward matters of good and evil, right and wrong. Type “feminism” in its search bar, and both Ladies First and Eléonore Pourriat’s 2018 I Am Not an Easy Man pop up. (Louis Theroux: Inside the Manosphere, perhaps not surprisingly, makes a cameo as well.) The former is the British/American adaptation of the latter, which was notably the first French-language feature commissioned by Ted Sarandos’ capital. Sight unseen (and going solely by online reviews and Letterboxd vibes), Pourriat’s film has a more acerbic ring to its name, a biting satire of chauvinist entitlement upended by blunt inversion, from a man living the privileged life to him left wanting and trapped by it in a woman’s world.
This same premise finds the slapdash protagonist of Ladies First, a Casanova-type exec named Damien Sachs (Sacha Baron Cohen) who is handed the reins as the new CEO of advertising agency Atlas. Not the utter sleazebag one might conjure à la Weinstein or the average Hollywood rapist, Damien is more of a showboat, a performative sexist — at least to the camera — who goes through the motions of sleeping around, being crass and dismissive toward women in general, and fondly trading in stereotypes and ugly banter with his congenial male besties. In short, he really couldn’t give a damn about specificities and, as a living caricature of casual misogyny, just about embodies the popular archetype of gender inequality. When Atlas fronts a stout campaign for Guinness and the pesky DEI regulations call for a token female as part of the creative presence, Damien manages to hire single mother Alex, played by Rosamund Pike (Alex’s name was first on the list alphabetically); fire her (she quit after a disastrously humiliating pitching session); and concuss himself on a lamppost, all within 10 or so minutes.
What ensues couldn’t be more predictable once the conceit is in place and the narrative gears duly turn. In Ladies First, function comes second to form, as the deconstruction of the patriarchy mainly involves substituting men with women wholesale and replicating the exact same patterns of oppression, the same double standards and blatant hypocrisies, even the same gynecological metaphors with men at the receiving end. Damien returns to the office, shocked at Alex’s new look — with her in charge and him as the obligatory diversity hire, he soon adjusts to this new women-centric arrangement while desperately seeking to regain his position as chief. He whores himself to erstwhile receptionist and current CEO Felicity (Fiona Shaw), flatters and ingratiates himself with janitor-turned-board member Glenda (Kathryn Hunter), and seeks solace and quiet solidarity with his colleagues of the effeminate male caste. A penile filler is undertaken with great apprehension and schadenfreude; objectification and woman-splaining are what he must endure with no possible recourse, except to a mysterious pigeon-owning hobo who claims he too once knew the “real world.”
To give Sharrock credit, the undermining of sexist tropes by standing them on their head is a surefire way to get the message cleanly across: that it’s hard as a woman, indeed, living in a horny, testosterone-fueled world, having to navigate invisible prejudices and shrug off painful injustice. But skip past the surface and the wording curdles into something both nefarious and inane. By merely substituting genders and pitting them head on in a battle of the sexes, the film’s exploitative vigor both overrides any real accountability by men (or women?) and worryingly reduces sexual discrimination to a happy inevitability. It also belabors the point twice or thrice over, cobbling together all the easy gags of dumb blondes and feminine meekness that might not even inhere today. Fitting perhaps for the ’80s and already clichéd by the ’90s, Ladies First commits the cardinal sin of being irresponsibly glib yet woefully inoffensive. There is more to be made from the casting choice — Gone Girl meets Borat — as with the real Mr. Sachs: a nauseating Zionist edgelord with the magnanimous lip purse of Jeffrey Epstein, Mr. Cohen may be in possession of an unchecked arrogance befitting the worst of today’s chauvinists. That his star vehicle should squander this uncanny potential in favor of mundane slopaganda is a great irony and a great shame.
DIRECTOR: Thea Sharrock; CAST: Sacha Baron Cohen, Rosamund Pike, Richard E. Grant, Emily Mortimer, Charles Dance; DISTRIBUTOR: Netflix; STREAMING: May 22; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 33 min.
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