I spent most of my life convinced, thanks to movies like “Groundhog Day” and “The Shaggy Dog,” that if you ever step out of line, an all-powerful deity will hold a magical intervention, just for you. Sure, there are real atrocities committed in the world, but if you’re a jerk to your co-workers or if you’re a mediocre dad, that’s when God itself steps in and manipulates time, for decades, just to teach you a valuable lesson. Or maybe it covers you in fur and forces you to poop in your backyard. Ever since the ghost thing worked for that Scrooge guy, I guess whoever’s in charge decided to have a little fun with it.
These types of stories exist to teach a protagonist — and, hopefully, the audience — that they’re not the center of the universe, while also telling them the universe thinks their petty problems are more important than anyone else’s. God won’t pull out all the stops to cure the sick, feed the hungry and save the oppressed, but he will turn your dad into Santa Claus if he spends too much time at the office. Even when the universe ties itself in knots to make life more fair, it finds a weirdly unfair way to do it.
Case in point: Thea Sharrock’s “Ladies First,” a well-intentioned but strange comedy remake starring Sacha Baron Cohen as Damien Sachs, a misogynistic advertising executive who hits his head and wakes up in a world where gender roles are reversed: Men have all the low-paying jobs, they’re objectified in the media and they’re sexually harassed every day; Women run the world and they run it the same way men do in the real world, with no differentiations. The point isn’t to show what the world would be like if women were in charge, the point is to show what the real world has always been like for women.
“Ladies First” is based on the 2018 French comedy “I Am Not an Easy Man,” directed and co-written by Éléonore Pourriat. That film was, in turn, based on Pourriat’s exceptional 2010 short “Oppressed Majority,” which is a horror movie. “Oppressed Majority” isn’t a quasi-rom-com about a sexist man who suddenly has to wear underwire testicle bras, it’s a harrowing story about the experience of misogyny and sexual assault.
The message of “Ladies First” is arguably the same, but this film is a magical comedy, and frequently a rom-com, which has an unusual effect on its message. Damien Sachs experiences deplorable sexual harassment from women who, in the “real” world, were originally his mistreated employees. Felicity Chase (Fiona Shaw) forces him to wear, in exchange for a promotion, a humiliating fetish outfit while he swings his exposed genitalia. This is a grotesque situation, but “Ladies Man” tries to find the humor in it, which doesn’t so much soften the blow as indict all the other comedies which treat misogyny like a joke.
It’s probably no coincidence that the narrative structure of “Ladies First” has a lot of similarities to the Nancy Meyers comedy “What Women Want,” another film about a misogynistic ad exec who thinks women breaking the glass ceiling is an injustice against men until there’s a magical intervention that teaches him women are people too. That film had disquieting undercurrents which went oddly unexplored, since denying women the privacy of their own thoughts is the same type of violation Mel Gibson should have been learning was wrong that whole time. So “Ladies First” isn’t just illustrating that the real world is sexist, it’s pointing fingers at other, similar films and saying that — whatever their original intentions, and despite their friendly tones — they can be part of the problem and sexist in their own way.
Rosamund Pike plays Alex Fox, an employee Damien promoted because she’s a women, just for optics. In the alternate reality, she’s just like Damien, a sexist and heartless a-hole who’s also his boss. Cohen may play the main character in “Ladies First” but Pike is the actor who owns it, proving for the umpteenth time she’s got more star power and talent than half the industry. She’s comfortable in a position of power, she’s fascinating even when she’s a total sleaze. It almost makes sense that “Ladies First” transforms into a romance between Damien and Alex, based on the actors and their chemistry, but it ironically makes people like Damien, in the real world, seem like they might be some kind of “catch.”
“Ladies First” isn’t particularly funny, and that’s a side effect of its sobering premise, which can’t be taken to logical conclusions without directly confronting the fact that the real world is fundamentally vile to more than half of its population. There may be camp value or at least a little catharsis in seeing the tables turned; by watching a sexist pig endure the same treatment he thoughtlessly doles out to others. But it’s easy to get distracted by the weird rules of this universe and lose sight of the “movie” part of the movie.
So whoever is in charge up there created a complete alternate reality, just to teach one sexist man a lesson every few months, in order to right the wrongs of the real world. That is an incredibly slow and unnecessarily complicated scheme to change the world. Why can’t that same God just create a reality where everyone is treated fairly in the first place? Why must we be stuck with a world where men get away with murder, and why is the only option a world where women are in power but act no differently? And why, if the point is to teach men like Damien — in the movie and in the audience — that they need to stop acting like the center of the universe, do we tell stories in which the universe literally revolves around them and their personal growth?
“Ladies First” goes to great lengths to be two different kinds of movies, a light comedy and a harsh morality tale, but the balance is never quite right. Still, the intended message of “Ladies First” comes across, generally at least, despite the perplexing internal logic. And just in case you didn’t get it yet, in the film’s final moments there’s pigeon man — an exposition-dump character played by an overqualified Richard E. Grant — who clarifies that this isn’t about the film’s protagonist, it’s about us, the audience. Thea Sharrock’s film effectively skewers institutionalized misogyny and sexist comedy movie tropes, but the message was clearer and more powerful in the original short, which was allowed to be disturbing without also having to be funny.
