‘This Movie Is: Absurd.” That’s the descriptive label given to Thea Sharrock’s comedy film Ladies First on Netflix. Damien (Sacha Baron Cohen) is a male chauvinist who knocks his head and wakes up in a world run by women who are like him: ruthless in the boardroom and the bedroom, using and losing the opposite sex when it suits them. In this alternative reality, he sees what it’s like to be on the receiving end of sexism. It co-stars a terrific Rosamund Pike as his employee in one world, and his boss in another, and Fiona Shaw first as a secretary, then as a predatory boss.
Ladies First may seem absurd, but by flipping the script, it points out double standards and gendered language in a simple way. Men are talked over in meetings and expected to conform to unrealistic beauty goals; Victoria’s Secret becomes Victor’s Secret. The movie has had largely negative reviews, and as a film critic, I had my issues with it: for every scene that had me laughing, another had me cringing, and the largely binary, heteronormative world it depicts is not everyone’s reality.
