“Ladies First” raises some genuinely interesting questions, though it doesn’t always dig deep enough to fully explore them. The film’s gender-swapped premise imagines a world where prejudice against men is as systemic as prejudice against women is in ours. It touches on everything from corporate culture to domestic life. Naked men advertise fast food for chains like Burger Queen and Five Gals. Boys are raised to be decorative and dutiful, and girls move through the world without the same social constraints. There’s even a joke about Saudi Arabia granting men the right to drive, observed with patronising amusement by one of the film’s female executives.
The unveiling of this matriarchal society has its moments, some genuinely clever, others more workmanlike. A funeral scene, for instance, opens on a priest in vestments invoking “the Mother, the Daughter, and the Holy Spirit,” to which mourners respond “a-women.” It lands, but the film leans heavily on this kind of rule-of-three construction, and the cumulative effect is one of diminishing returns. The jokes rarely surprise, which keeps them from landing as sharply as they might.
The film is adapted from the 2018 French comedy “I Am Not an Easy Man,” which accounts for its somewhat irreverent, sexually charged sensibility. The screenplay is witty on the surface but rarely ventures beneath it. “Ladies First” eventually settles into rom-com territory in its final act, a move that feels predictable, though not entirely unwelcome.
The story begins in familiar fashion, following Damien Sachs (Sacha Baron Cohen), a charming and self-satisfied ad executive whose world has been shaped entirely to his advantage. His mentor Fred (Charles Dance), the firm’s CEO, is grooming him as a successor, until a chance collision with Alex Fox (Rosamund Pike), the firm’s sole female creative director, sends him tumbling into an alternate reality where the gender dynamics are completely reversed.
In this new world, Damien faces everything Alex once did: being side-lined, sexualised, and dismissed. CEO Felicity Chase (Fiona Shaw) pursues him with the kind of entitled disregard Damien himself once showed women, while Alex has transformed into a self-assured, hard-drinking power player. The reversals are pointed, if straightforward. One might reasonably ask whether a society shaped by thousands of years of female dominance would truly mirror a patriarchy so closely in its structures and attitudes, the film doesn’t try to answer that, because that’s not quite its aim.
The film’s real ambition is empathy through identification, asking male viewers to feel, vicariously, what women navigate daily. It’s a well-intentioned approach, and one that has worked in other contexts, though it does require the audience to invest in Damien despite his early unpleasantness. Whether that investment pays off likely depends on the viewer. There’s also a reasonable question about who the film is actually reaching: the men most in need of its message are probably not its core audience.
For female viewers, “Ladies First” offers some recognisable satisfactions, moments where the absurdity of gender imbalance is laid bare with clarity, if not always with wit. These scenes are competently done, though not markedly different in impact from similar sequences in comparable films made by male filmmakers.
What the film captures well, even if it doesn’t fully capitalise on it, is how entrenched these dynamics are and how much effort it takes to shift them. Its conclusion, that men should simply do better, is earnest, if a little thin. As a comedy, “Ladies First” is uneven; as a provocation, it is mild. But as a piece of mainstream entertainment willing to engage with these questions at all, it has a certain modest value.
