Sacha Baron Cohen is knocked unconscious early in Netflix comedy Ladies First, a film that only sometimes makes you wish the same for yourself. Then again, a Baron Cohen movie is too loud a place to get any peace for long. The comic actor’s role is Damien Sachs, a strutting sexist about to ascend to CEO of a ritzy London ad agency. The blow to the head comes in the course of unjustly firing a junior woman colleague (Rosamund Pike).
And so, on awakening, Sachs finds himself in a topsy-turvy world in which gender roles and tropes are neatly reversed. Per the examples of the script, women now swap crude banter, crotch scratch and dominate corporate hierarchies. Men own cats, take spin classes, and buy involved underwear at Victor’s Secret. I could go on.
Meanwhile, back at work, Pike is now the boorish alpha in line for the top job. (This hugely talented actor always seems to pick her films with the aid of a tombola.) Director Thea Sharrock keeps the tone scrupulously light, but the interior logic is not always obvious. In this brave new matriarchy, everyone removes their body hair, a puzzle that does allow for many scenes of Baron Cohen wincing at the waxer.
Rosamund Pike and Fiona Shaw in ‘Ladies First’
© Rob Youngson/Netflix
Despite a tight grip on pre-publicity, it has already been observed that the premise might seem familiar if, like me, you are as old as time. The movie is a loose remake of 2018 French comedy I Am Not An Easy Man, but owes another debt to The Worm That Turned, a 1980 serial from British TV double act The Two Ronnies.
The mood can be similarly vintage. (The grimness of the manosphere goes unmentioned.) Yet time has still brought change.
Where Ronnies Barker and Corbett wore floral aprons, Baron Cohen takes off his shirt and pops his pecs, in an impressive advert for what the gym can do for the mid-life male body of a film star. What more could Gloria Steinem have asked for?
On Netflix from May 22
