Ladies First
Sacha Baron Cohen and Rosamund Pike are gender-flipped in Thea Sharrock’s broad but entertaining comic fantasy.
Junk male: Fiona Shaw and Sacha Baron Cohen
Image courtesy of Netflix.
by JAMES CAMERON-WILSON
When the arch manipulator and criminal flirt Damien Sachs utters the eponymous statement, his world is about to change forever. Besides being a pathological liar and a died-in-the-wool misogynist, Damien is on the verge of becoming CEO of the advertising agency he works for. In order to provide a more acceptable optic for a major client (Guinness), Damien plucks a female contender on his list without even looking at her pitch – because she’s first in the alphabetical list of hopefuls, namely one Alex Fox (Rosamund Pike). Alex has actually worked at the company for twenty years, but Damien has never bothered to clock her name – not, that is, until she saunters into his office with ideas above her station. When his secretary suggests that she might be sexual game, he snaps, “Ruby, that’s really offensive – she’s twenty years too old for me.”
A voice-over provided by Richard E. Grant tells us that “this is a story about a man named Damien. Damien had it all – wealth, sex, power. Because he was also an arsehole.” Baron Cohen has never been afraid to look unattractive on screen, but here he plays a Lothario of the finest cut, his smarm being his most repellent trait. And with Rosamund Pike joining him centre stage, we know that Damien has his work cut out for him…
We first find Damien at a luxury retreat in Ibiza where he has just bedded a beauty young enough to be his daughter. As he leaves, he wakes her up with expensive gifts and ingratiating flattery, telling her, “last night was incredible. I ordered you breakfast. I didn’t know what you wanted, so I got you one of everything. Anything for the woman… who took my virginity.”
What we don’t expect is that Damien is about to tumble into a parallel universe, when a knock on the head sends him into a matriarchal society. He wakes up to find himself in a misandrist world, a place in which men are constantly held accountable for their looks, are continually mocked and interrupted and are way down the pecking order in the work place. For Damien, everything is upside down, with familiar brand names now called Burger Queen and Vincent Westwood and with books about Harriet Potter, Donna Quixote and The Lady of the Rings. One day ago he was this close to becoming CEO of the Atlas Agency and now he cannot get a word in edgeways, with Alex Frost a top executive and the receptionist Felicity Chase (Fiona Shaw) now in charge.
Ladies First is an English remake of the 2018 French romcom I Am Not an Easy Man written and directed by Éléonore Pourriat, with the directorial reins now passed on to Thea Sharrock. There’s also a couple of female screenwriters in the mix and two of the three producers are women, too. It would be interesting to contemplate what sort of commentary on the manosphere a male director and scenarist might have made of this farcical material, it being a gender-flipping fantasy designed to make male viewers feel decidedly uneasy. But it is still a man’s world and even today things have changed not that much, although Ladies First often still feels rather old hat. Twenty-six years ago Mel Gibson starred in Nancy Meyers’ What Women Want and he likewise played a chauvinistic advertising executive who entered a whole new world after being knocked unconscious. Here, much humour is milked from the transition of gender tropes and the film does make some telling points. But Ladies First is less successful as a romantic comedy, as Baron Cohen and Ms Pike battle more for our guffaws than for our heart strings. Even so, there’s enough incidental humour and some lovely character turns (Fiona Shaw and Bill Paterson are always good value), to make this an agreeable distraction for fans of the Baron and his Baroness.
Cast: Sacha Baron Cohen, Rosamund Pike, Charles Dance, Emily Mortimer, Tom Davis, Richard E. Grant, Fiona Shaw, Weruche Opia, Kathryn Hunter, Kadiff Kirwan, Bill Paterson, Red Tennant, Ron Cook, Deborah Findlay.
Dir Thea Sharrock, Pro Liza Chasin, Eleonore Dailly and Edouard de Lachomette, Screenplay Natalie Krinsky, Cinco Paul and Katie Silberman, Ph Haris Zambarloukos, Pro Des Chris Lowe, Ed Mark Everson, Music Atli Örvarsson, Costumes Lauren Reyhani, Dialect coach Jamie Matthewman.
3dot Productions-Netflix.
93 mins. UK/USA. 2026. UK and US Rel: 22 May 2026. Cert. 15.
