Two Women: Racy Remake of 1970 Quebec Sex Comedy Still Sparkles

By Chris Knight

Rating: A

Where exactly is the border between art and porn? Most people know both when they see them, but Quebec director Chloé Robichaud (Sarah Prefers to Run) skates very close to the edge with her very funny sex comedy Two Women.

The film, whose French-language title is Deux Femmes en or (Two Woman in Gold), follows the lives of a translator named Florence (Karine Gonthier-Hyndman) and her next-door neighbour and new mother Violette (Laurence Leboeuf).

That next-door-ness is important, because the film opens with Violette complaining to her husband that Florence and her man keep having noisy sex on the opposite side of their bedroom wall, with Violette as the unwilling “ear witness.”

But when she brings it up with Florence — going so far as to recreate the sounds in question — the other woman says the noise must be a crow, since she hasn’t had sex with her husband in months. Awkward!

Soon, however, Violette and Florence are having a lot of sex — just not with their husbands. Kudos to writer Catherine Léger for not including a pizza delivery man asking who ordered extra sausage, but most of the other porn tropes come into play. There’s the plumber, the exterminator, the cable guy, the cleaner. Florence even flashes an electrician working on a hydro pole outside her window.

What about their husbands, you ask? Well, Violette’s partner is busy bonking a colleague from work, which might explain why he’s putting in such long hours on the road. And Florence’s man seems more interested in renovating the greenhouse at their Montreal co-op, even when a sexy environmentalist shows an interest. (He also gets one of the film’s best lines: “Our relationship works best when one of us is on antidepressants.”)

Two Women, for all its entertainment value, is silly and shallow, though deeper than porn, it must be said. The conclusion finds one couple separating while the other finds a way to stay together, but one could easily imagine those conclusions being reversed with little impact on the story.

What most surprised this Gen-X critic was the fact that the film is a remake, based on Claude Fournier’s racy 1970 comedy of the same name. You’re telling me they’d already invented sex that long ago? Mon Dieu!

Two Women. Directed by Chloé Robichaud. Starring Karine Gonthier-Hyndman and Laurence Leboeuf. In theatres May 30.