Calgary Underground 2025 Review: TWO WOMEN, A Modern Remake of Quebec Sex Comedy

A tiny camera move during a scene at a Montreal Canadiens hockey game demonstrates what good direction can do: the storytelling happens via the camera itself, revealing the gag (which I will not) and surprising the audience with something possible only in movie storytelling. This is one of many moments in Two Women that lets us know that we are in fine hands. 

 

If you live outside of Quebec, you are likely unfamiliar with the original film, Deux Femmes En Or, a 1970s sex farce which skewered the burgeoning feminist movement at the time. It became an unlikely smash hit in the isolated regional cinema landscape of French Canada, where it almost singlehandedly saved the industry, which was wilting at the time. More recently, it was updated into a stage play, Home Deliveries, by Catherine Léger, which has now been adapted into this feature film (written and produced by Léger), coming (ahem) full circle, but dropping the 'In Gold' from the title.

Beautifully shot on 35mm film, Chloé Robichaud’s Two Women offers a modern re-evaluation of the hoariest of 1970s porny tropes: the bored housewife having sex with the local handyman. And yet, it is also a great conversation piece about the paths we choose to take, in marriage, in parenthood, and more broadly, in life where “being an adult can sometimes suck.”



Violet and Florence are neighbours in a housing co-op. Both are moms, and both of their relationships are painfully stagnant. They are seen early on (in one of the films signature bits of superb framing) staring out the window, like trapped birds, side by side, but not together.

 

Genre fans will recognise Laurence LaBeouf as the gnome-stick wielding heroine Apple in Turbo-Kid, but here, as Violet, she struggles with a breast pump, the dreary loneliness while her child is in daycare, and obsesses that the cawing of the crows are the sounds of orgasms she is not having. Her husband, Benoit, is often on the road with his job and cheating on Violet with a co-worker. His mistress finds Benoit's middle-age patheticness a kind of turn-on.


Florence (Karine Gonthier-Hyndman) is less passive than Violet, choosing to toss her antidepressants away because she feels they are slowing asphyxiating her “self.” Her husband, David, attempts to assure her, “When your mental health is good, I find you attractive,” but they have not had sex in months, and he spends more time misting the wilted plants in the housing co-op’s struggling greenhouse than anything else. Florence is the main driver of the story, and it is hard not to be on her side, even as she desperately dismantles all of her domestic guardrails, for something more, even if only the romance of self destruction. 


 

Both women, independently it should be noted, make the choice that casual sex is the way out of their domestic and maternal cage. With each following a different trajectory, Two Women retains the goofy innuendo and clumsy seduction of the faceless local service men (exterminators, plumbers, the cable guy), but invests itself in the fully fleshed out foursome, their average lives grounded human issues in a snow-encrusted, but lived-in Montreal neighborhood. The dynamics of the housing complex gets its own fair bit of attention, with its residents on top of each other, often disagreeably, as does the city itself.

Robichaud makes fine use of mirrors and reflections inside of Violet and Florence's domestic spaces, as she mines each space for laughs and (light) pathos. The film focuses on the women, but also has a surprising amount time and care for their struggling husbands, with the story encompassing a pretty healthy and interesting conversation about monogamy, partnership, and individual needs. The naughty, silly fantasy of soft-core sex may exist for the middle-aged ‘wine-lady’ set, but the film goes about slyly applying a more modern lens around libido, mental health, and the complex social pressures of a hyper-mediated 21st century.

In a subtle fashion, one that belies the sexual innuendo of the original hook, Two Women manages to take the piss out of the current wave of feminism, in a seemingly effortless French Canadian way. It is well-made fun, all the while sneakily delivering reasons why being an adult, a parent, a spouse, does not have to suck.