I just watched Ladies First on Netflix, because, yes, in Rosamund Pike, Fiona Shaw, Charles Dance and Richard E Grant I was like 'solid core cast', but also every single review I saw by a male critic had given it one star and said it was unfunny, and anti-feminist, so I needed to judge for myself.
And I really liked it. I found it funny (Fiona's scene where she dies from an orgasm sent me), and I liked that it was a lighthearted comedy whilst still make a few points without being too heavy.
And that's the thing, it's like when people have started saying Barbie shouldn't be celebrated because the film only did surface level feminism. Not every film or piece of media has to be miles deep. There is media for that, but some media is light, both to allow people an element of escapism, and also to allow messages and commentaries to be more accessible to those who, perhaps, have never considered these things before.
Ladies First isn't meant to be a deep dive into the patriarchy, it's just an observance, and through switching the role, it shows the absurdity of male behaviour and the patriarchy, while also pointing out that no matter how good a woman is, her chances of success are infinitely smaller than a man who is less or equally talented. It also, at one point, leaned into a nod to old rom com films but, again, with gender behaviour switched, which also made me laugh.
And that's another thing so many people criticising the film have missed; the world Damien is sent in is not a world in which women are in charge. It's a world in which the women are the men. The women behave like the men, they're in power like the men, they've written history like the men. It isn't a flip of roles, it's a flip of behaviours, because that's the only way Damien can experience what women go through is for their to be a world where the behaviour/positions are flipped.
If he'd been sent to a world where women were in charge, it could have still been a healthy, mostly non-toxic work place and world where Damien would have had a fair chance at his job. In order for him to experience what women go through, the women had to behave like the men-- being obscene, arrogant, aggressive, dismissive of the opposite gender--and the men have to behave like the women (being forced to engage in high beauty standards in order to be taken seriously, being reminded to watch their weight, being considered a failure if they're not married, being passed over for promotions, relegated to the 'emotional' side of things, the nuturing side etc)
And the line 'if men could sleep their way to the top, there'd already be loads of us up there' was funny, but brilliant, considering how many men say we can just sleep our way up. Because if that were true...as Charles Dance's character said, a load of us would already be up there.
