Still from the film Photo: Sara Mishara Still from the film Photo: Sara Mishara

When we meet the eponymous duo in Chloé Robichaud’s Two Women, they are caught in stagnation. This new riff on the 1970 film, Two Women in Gold, circles two mothers resurrecting hunger for pleasure. Violette (Laurence Leboeuf) has just stepped into motherhood. Her sex life is stalled in the constant rush to look after her baby, with her husband, Benoit (Felix Moati) hardly around. She hears noise from her neighbor, Florence’s (Karine Gonthier-Hyndman) flat and suspects her to be having a glorious sex life. Violette is envious and wistful, but Florence dismisses her notion. The truth is starkly different. Florence’s husband, David (Mani Soleymanlou), can’t summon interest in stoking their sexual relations back on track. Their lives have been wrapped in raising their adolescent son. But her neighbour’s impression stirs something profound in Florence. She skips her anti-depressants to fire up her long-gone libido. Thus begins a spate of frenzied, rambunctious sexual encounters with any man who walks into Florence’s flat. She nudges and empowers Violette to go grab pleasure in any and whichever form, eluding her as well. Florence rails that monogamy is invented for men. Women should loosen themselves from propriety. Of what use is being right, sticking to doing the right thing? There are no medals doled out, the women emphasize.

The film gives the women unapologetic sexual vivacity; it’s a force that singularly reanimates their lives, lends a thrust of desire for just learning to love life again, with all its teasing possibilities. For Florence, it begins with her flashing to a construction worker. From then on, she’s unstoppable. It is an awakening to the “infinite kinds of pleasure”, that Florence talks about, guiding their newfound joy, furtive pleasures away from the folds of mundane, cheerless marriages. It’s all about recognizing and allowing yourself the right to pleasure and ecstasy long-buried or shoved aside. So, there’s immense power and intractable finality in Florence’s quiet assertion to a cable guy: “I’m ready for pleasure”. Nothing about their husbands sparks any hunger. David is much too eager to retract and Benoit is almost perennially absent, citing work while cheating on Violette with his colleague, Eli. Montages of sexual escapades the women have with abandon and zest, ranging among plumbers and cleaners and others, are as delightfully light-footed as they are glorious self-affirmations. Life, that has felt so stultified and depleting, bursts again with joy and curiosity, a yearning for more.

Wisely, Two Women refuses to take itself too seriously or drown in somber ramifications. It’s spry and supremely self-aware of its comic disposition. Men are firmly at the receiving end of jokes, their wretched haplessness, propensity to believe too stiffly in their attractiveness and pliability become the stuff of amusement. Catherine Léger’s screenplay doesn’t pretend to be greatly interested in the husbands, flinging them scraps of miserable realization of their delusions. David and Benoit are pitched as bumbling and wrangled in their sex lives. If the former is oblivious and a bit of a dullard, the latter has to be told by Eli that she’s not even remotely romantically drawn to him. This never struck him; the exact contours of his relationship are wholly misplaced and far more exaggerated in his perception than what it really is. Eli is a hard-talker, direct and blunt in expressing what she feels, holding nothing back. You do crave, though, Eli was written with a tad more care; she comes off as summarily cobbled together from dated visual conceptions of a modern, emancipated woman who has no qualms to speak her mind. He is flabbergasted by the discovery. But before the film seems like it’s eliciting sympathy for Benoit, it swivels back to Violette.

Nevertheless, there’s quite an acrid, unwelcome aftertaste in how the narrative hews into place Violette’s ultimate decision. It’s the result of a climax hasty in combing a climax into place, driven by need to put pleasant, tidy send-offs for its two heroines rather than organic denouement. Where’s the mess of human vulnerability, indecision and recklessness which radiantly filled the film till then? The climax renders dramatically pulsing situations too pat, striking contrived notes. However, Two Women is buoyed by such effervescent, emotionally grounded performances both from Leboeuf and Gonthier-Hyndman niggling issues don’t up-end the film.

Debanjan Dhar is covering Sundance Film Festival 2025 as part of the accredited press.

Speaking of Malaysia, they kicked off their campaign with a 2-2 draw against Pakistan. However, in their second game, the hosts, China, proved too strong as Malaysia could only score twice while China found the net four times, winning the match 4-2.

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