For about as long as we’ve been exploring social and cultural dynamics on screen, there have been instances where someone has an idea to subvert expectations and look at a subject from a very different perspective. One of the most common areas in which we find this happening is in works that propose alternative realities, versions of life that seem very close to our own, but where something crucial has changed or shifted in a completely different direction. This is the starting point for Ladies First, a film directed by Thea Sharrock, based on the French film I Am Not an Easy Man, which explores gender from a few different points of view, having its roots in a short film about a stay-at-home father discovering the effects of sexism when the roles are reversed. The film centres around Damien Sachs, a wealthy playboy who believes himself to be infallible – he’s on the verge of being given a major promotion, he’s supposedly irresistible to women, and he lives a life of complex luxury, made even easier by the fact that no one would dare turn such a powerful man down. However, he meets his match in Alex Fox, a hard-working employee at his company, whom he is forced to promote to creative director to meet inclusion standards. Unlike every other woman in his life, Alex does not fall under Damien’s spell, and when he reveals the reason behind her hiring, she causes a scene that ultimately results in Damien sustaining an injury that knocks him out. Upon regaining consciousness, he finds that he has found his way into an alternative reality, where the world is now run by women, and men are now deemed the “fairer sex”, having to endure the same mistreatment and blatant objectification, forcing Damien to see just how much he contributed to making the world a deeply hostile place. If this premise sounds familiar, or at least somewhat derivative, it’s because Ladies First is such an obvious, surface-level attempt at satire that not only fails to stick the landing, but fumbles the paltry amount of goodwill that it had through simply being hopelessly and undeniably out of date in an era where this kind of benign storytelling is simply too lazy to be considered even vaguely acceptable.

Ladies First is a film that is built from a very common premise, which is the role-reversal trope on which so many films are based. This is one of the more obvious ways to tell such a story, since it comes with an innate structure centred around one common goal, namely to explore what would happen if two entirely different entities just switched places, and had to realise that life is not particularly easy for each other. We usually find this happening to individuals more than entire populations, but this film proposes an alternative scenario in which the entire world is flipped around, and where women are the more dominant sex, not suddenly as part of some radical shift, but rather the result of centuries of female-first focus, the inverse being the root of the current patriarchal society against which so many are adamantly protesting. It’s not difficult to see why this concept would be appealing, especially for a comedy, since the idea of someone who has lived his entire life treating women as second-class citizens suddenly being forced to walk in their shoes (in some cases, quite literally) has a lot of potential, especially since there are interesting ideas that could be found scattered liberally throughout this story. Despite the continued efforts to give women the exposure and power that they deserve, inclusion and representation is still a contentious subject, and even with the incredible progress done by the feminist movements over the past two centuries, we’re still finding ourselves engaged in a continuous debate around the importance of representation, especially when it comes to the subject of equality, which should not be a controversial subject but nonetheless proves to have some severely misguided but unfortunately very loud proponents. The extent to which Ladies First is willing to interrogate these ideas is a different matter entirely, but just based on the premise at a glance, we can see the potential lingering beneath the surface of this film, one that could’ve been far stronger in the hands of a screenwriter and director who knew how to handle all these various elements without resorting to the most obvious techniques imaginable.

Sharrock is a filmmaker who is still finding her voice, with only a small handful of films under her belt (one of which being the wonderful Wicked Litle Letters, which actually did manage to be a subversive and bitingly funny satire), but unfortunately she’s not developed her skills enough to be able to elevate what turns out to be a mostly dismal screenplay, one that doesn’t only aim for the low-hanging fruit, but seems to be unable to get off the floor itself, writhing around in agony as it desperately tries to be insightful, funny and meaningful, when in reality there’s actually nothing embedded in this film that is even partially interesting. If you are going to make a film that already walks a potentially controversial narrative tightrope in the form of switching the roles usually occupied by men and women, you should at least pay attention to the small details, since the broadly comedic aspects run the risk of not only overwhelming the film but also entirely enveloping every bit of promise it had at the outset. What makes Ladies First so frustrating is the knowledge that it had good intentions, and we can clearly see what it was trying to achieve – but unfortunately, it is impossible to tell what many consider to be a progressive story in the form of a morality tale while also essentially constructing a film that considers the subversion of gender roles to be turning all women in foul-mouthed, grotesque monstrosities, and all the men into overly effeminate, perpetually submissive figures. You could argue that this was entirely the point, and we can see the intention quite clearly, but it’s in the execution that it fumbles, and a good idea means very little when there isn’t enough effort put into actually developing on these themes. It also tends to be quite heavy-handed in terms of the storyline and what it intends to convey. It is already troubling enough when a satire feels like it needs to serve its message on a platter, but Ladies First has the subtlelty to a sledgehammer to the forehead when it comes to stating its purpose, and the only reason it doesn’t feel outright insulting is because it is frankly beyond dull, lacking any nuance and being deeply annoying at even those rare moments where it does show some degree of promise.

We have to wonder whether the filmmakers knew that they were working with something potentially quite lacklustre and chose to throw in as many familiar actors as they could to hopefully distract from the poor screenplay and heavy-handed execution. The decision to cast Sacha Baron Cohen, who has now developed a reputation as one of the most insincere actors of his generation, is beyond questionable. We can understand choosing him to star based on the fact that half the film entails him acting like an entitled, pompous hedonist who wholeheartedly believes in his misogynistic worldview, but when it comes to actually having him learn a lesson and change his ways, the film immediately falls apart beyond the point of no return. We simply cannot be convinced that Baron Cohen has it in him to play a sympathetic character, and while he’s not untalented (when he is in his niche, he can be fantastic), he’s not the kind of actor who has ever thrived on having character arcs. Conversely, we do have Rosamund Pike as his rival, and while she is a far more versatile performer, she is not done any favours by playing a character who remains a stereotype, regardless of which of the two realities we find the story in. Pike has a commanding screen presence, and Sharrock does manage to cultivate some of that for this film (she is by far the only truly redeemable aspect of the film), but its just not enough – had she been paired with an actor who we actually can find to be as charismatic as the film wants us to believe the character of Damien can be when he is not spewing chauvinistic insults, perhaps the entire project would have fared far better. Supporting parts by Fiona Shaw, Charles Dance, Richard E. Grant and Kathryn Hunter (all four extraordinary actors, and I simply cannot fathom that this the quality of work that these veterans are being offered) are entertaining but otherwise just as shallow as the film that surrounds them, nothing more than well-maintained plot devices that lack any depth, despite the good work being done by the cast. The unusually strong ensemble is mostly wasted, which is just one of the many areas in which this film proves to be a failure.

While it may not be the only example of a film that attempts to be a good-natured satire that ultimately proves to be mostly quite myopic in its perspective, Ladies First is the rare instance of a film that had good intentions but proved to be so wholeheartedly regressive in its politics and cultural stance that we actually scramble to try and determine whether this was written decades ago, and simply dusted off and thrown on screen. This does not feel like a film that anyone should be making today, and the fact that it feels like it was plucked directly from the 1990s, where this kind of gently mocking gender-based satire was more palatable (albeit not any more acceptable), is only a further sign of the countless problems we find with this film. It becomes increasingly difficult to find ways to justify the time it took to see this film – the fact that its the rare mainstream comedy that realises that it doesn’t need to exceed 90 minutes, or some of the well-crafted filmmaking (which includes some subtle details that differentiate the female-focused version of our world), is rendered almost entirely redundant by a story that simply lacks any nuance or consistency, being a hopelessly bland and frankly misguided attempt at a complex comedy. We can attribute this to the film breaking the one cardinal rule of satire: have something meaningful to say, beyond the obvious. The idea of a deeply hateful man being transported into a world where he becomes the victim of the same system he helped maintain is not enough to justify the lazy writing, overwrought tone and lacklustre message, all of which come together to form the foundation of a film that had so much potential, but squanders all of it on cheap humour, didactic dialogue and a complete disregard for anything even vaguely resembling a meaningful satire.