{"id":619626,"date":"2026-04-20T17:43:09","date_gmt":"2026-04-20T17:43:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/619626\/"},"modified":"2026-04-20T17:43:09","modified_gmt":"2026-04-20T17:43:09","slug":"is-sacha-baron-cohen-and-rosamund-pikes-new-gender-swap-comedy-inspired-by-the-two-ronnies-movies","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/619626\/","title":{"rendered":"Is Sacha Baron Cohen and Rosamund Pike\u2019s new gender swap comedy inspired by The Two Ronnies? | Movies"},"content":{"rendered":"

At the end of last week, a trailer dropped for a new Netflix movie entitled Ladies First. Starring Sacha Baron Cohen<\/a> and Rosamund Pike, the film is billed as a \u201cplayful satire\u201d about a man who bumps his head and discovers that women have taken over the world.<\/p>\n

And what a nightmare it is. There is a female pope. King\u2019s Cross is now called Queen\u2019s Cross. Baron Cohen discovers, to his horror, that he now owns a cat. Judging by the trailer he spends most of the movie getting waxed, wearing impractical underwear and being leered at by female cab drivers. At one point, after Baron Cohen starts a sentence with \u201cIf the board had any balls,\u201d Pike speed-shouts: \u201cThe delicate sacks that dangle from your body, with the slightest tap sends you weeping to the ground?\u201d by way of reply. If they gave out Oscars for doing your best with unscannable dialogue, she would be a shoo-in.<\/p>\n

All of which is to say that Ladies First doesn\u2019t look particularly nuanced. Nor, for that matter, is it particularly original. Mel Gibson\u2019s 2000 comedy What Women Want seems to be a touchstone here, since both are films about concussed chauvinists who find themselves baffled by the female mind. But to find a closer comparison, you need to go back a further 20 years.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

Scattered through the eighth series of, of all things, The Two Ronnies was a serialised run of sketches entitled The Worm That Turned<\/a>. Put together, the sketches make up a feature-length story about a dystopian 2012 society that has been taken over by women. As hard as this may be to believe, it hasn\u2019t aged well.<\/p>\n

The Worm That Turned was a kneejerk reaction to Margaret Thatcher\u2019s position as prime minister, picturing a world where \u201chousewives all over England, delighted by her rise to power, voted more and more women in and more and more men out.\u201d Firmly in charge, the women closed The Playboy Club and renamed Big Ben as Big Brenda. The state police started wearing sexy leather Nazi-esque uniforms. Men, forced to wear dresses, looked to be on the back foot for ever until they discovered the one true weakness of their oppressors: they were all scared of mice.<\/p>\n

Men are forced to wear dresses \u2026 The Two Ronnies in The Worm That Turned. Photograph: PA Images\/Alamy<\/p>\n

You would have thought that we had moved on as a society over the last 46 years, but the comments underneath a YouTube upload of The Worm That Turned suggest otherwise, with many of the commenters appearing to mistake it for a hard-hitting documentary. \u201cThis storyline is becoming a reality,\u201d one writes. \u201cI never thought this would actually happen,\u201d writes another. \u201cLoved the jazz funk synth score in this,\u201d writes a third, less relevantly.<\/p>\n

Of course, Ladies First has a much more direct inspiration, in the form of the film it is literally based on. I Am Not an Easy Man<\/a> is a 2018 film by French director \u00c9l\u00e9onore Pourriat, and it has the exact same premise as Ladies First. A chauvinist bonks himself on the head and finds himself living in a nightmare world where he is judged on his appearance and sex is over long before he has finished.<\/p>\n

I Am Not an Easy Man contained a lot of the jokes that look set to characterise Ladies First in an effort to make the concept more palatable. But I Am Not an Easy Man was also a remake, of Pourriat\u2019s 2010 short Majorit\u00e9 Opprim\u00e9e. And it is leagues above any of its descendants.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

There is no swaggering bigotry or cartoonish concussion in Majorit\u00e9 Opprim\u00e9e. With just 10 minutes to set out its wares, the short goes straight for the jugular. A stay at home dad is undermined by various women, until he is sexually assaulted in the street. The police doubt the veracity of his story, and his wife seems to suggest that he was asking for it by dressing provocatively. The man at the centre is completely alone, and scared, and angry.<\/p>\n

And this anger, about being systematically neglected by society, is the entire point. It feels like a vividly personal piece, in a way that I Am Not an Easy Man (and let\u2019s assume Ladies First) does not. Unlike everything else, it has the courage not to play the premise for laughs, and it is all the better for it. Put aside 10 minutes for it now and save yourself a couple of hours when Ladies First comes out next month.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"At the end of last week, a trailer dropped for a new Netflix movie entitled Ladies First. Starring…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":619627,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[32],"tags":[64,63,447,134],"class_list":{"0":"post-619626","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-celebrities","8":"tag-au","9":"tag-australia","10":"tag-celebrities","11":"tag-entertainment"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/619626","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=619626"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/619626\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/619627"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=619626"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=619626"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=619626"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}