Two Women

by Matt Weiner

“Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.” It’s a fitting aphorism for the new Two Women, Chloé Robichaud’s remake of the original 1970 film that probes how much has really changed for women since the sexual revolution of the 1960s and 70s.

Florence (Karine Gonthier-Hyndman) and Violette (Laurence Leboeuf) have a lot in common. The two women live next to each other in a large Montreal apartment complex, share feelings of sexual frustration and a lack of desire with their current partners, and have to deal with mental health issues around new motherhood (for Violette) and depression (for Florence).

The two women bond with one another over their shared frustrations, a bond that deepens quickly when they both seek out casual affairs from relative strangers in the apartment complex. This breezy update, written by Catherine Léger, puts a modern spin on the original, with app-based encounters helping to supercharge the litany of cable guys, repairmen and delivery people who make up the anonymous casual sex for the women.

And these men (plus the occasional woman) are truly anonymous—they are credited by occupation only. This leads to some comic relief as the neighbors start to sense something going on with the revolving door of service workers going in and out of the women’s apartments. But it also adds a serious note to their sexual adventuring.

Florence and Violette reclaim these pornified archetypes for their own journeys of self-discovery, complete with intentionally awkward and turgid come-ons as the women make their desires known to the bemused workers. It helps that Gonthier-Hyndman and Leboeuf excel at giving the risqué romps emotional heft. We see both of their characters go from halting, even fumbling encounters to a fully realized confidence by the end of the film.

While the leading women are fantastic, the film is on shakier ground when it pulls back to ascribe some broader societal points about their sexual politics. Monogamy and mental health both factor into where the story winds up going, but Robichaud’s otherwise light comic touch winds up making these threads feel underbaked while also not given enough weight.

There’s a frank sweetness to the film that, along with the grounded performances, keeps the philosophical detours from ever derailing the movie’s charm, however. This is in no small part thanks to fully inhabited performances from the women’s partners, the tragicomic David (an excellent Mani Soleymanlou) and churlish Benoit (Félix Moati). We may have gone through enough waves of social change in the last 50 years to know that “having it all” is its own unrealistic myth for anyone in today’s world. But Two Women shows that, six decades on, that shouldn’t stop you from asking what you actually desire in your life, whether that’s fixing the cable or “fixing the cable.”