(L–R) Juliette Gariépy, Mani Soleymanlou, Karine Gonthier-Hyndman, Chloé Robichaud, Laurence Leboeuf, and Sophie Nélisse attend the 2025 Sundance Film Festival premiere of “Two Women” at The Ray Theatre on January 25, 2025 in Park City, UT. (Photo by Robin Marshall/Shutterstock for Sundance Film Festival)
By Shelby Shaw
“Do I still have a voice?” director Chloé Robichaud asks at the January 25 post-premiere Q&A for Two Women. She isn’t referring to herself in a metaphor; she really has lost her voice, but she rasps through enough to be understood, inviting screenwriter Catherine Léger and actors Juliette Gariépy, Sophie Nélisse, Mani Soleymanlou, and leads Laurence Leboeuf and Karine Gonthier-Hyndman to join her onstage.
Sharing a bedroom wall with your neighbor’s bedroom is an easy way to become familiar with their intimate life — or lack thereof. Not shying away from confronting the desires and complexities of sexuality and heteronormative monogamous relationships, Two Women is a frank take on pleasure in the modern age. Adapting the film from its original 1970 source material — the sex comedy Two Women in Gold (Deux femmes en or) by Claude Fournier — screenwriter Catherine Léger has transitioned the groovy housewife plot into a world of contemporary housing co-op disputes, smartphone dating apps, and making money by selling your belongings online.
“I thought I was going from material where women were less free,” says Léger about the adaptation process. “And then I realized that there was something that women still felt, trapped in boredom, even though they weren’t stay-at-home [wives] taking care of the kids, having no career. There still was something missing, and there was still some frustration.” Writing the film, which premiered in the Festival’s World Cinema Dramatic Competition, was about digging into these frustrations about being a “good girl” and following the unspoken domestic rules Léger believes women were yearning to break free of.
Thinking she’s hearing a crow trapped in the walls between their apartments, Violette (Leboeuf), at home with a newborn all day, asks her neighbor, Florence (Gonthier-Hyndman), about the sound. But when Florence is dubious of any crow in the walls, Violette assumes the caw-caws she’s hearing are not birds, but must be Florence’s sex life. Until Florence reveals that she and her partner, David (Soleymanlou), have not had sex in years.
“To be able to make a film about female desire [from] the point of view of female characters, and just film men’s bodies — you don’t do that often,” says Robichaud on why she chose to direct this film. “I wanted to film the sex scenes like true sensations and maybe see nudity in more day-to-day scenes, like when [Violette’s] breast-pumping.”
After discussing the mysterious crow, the two neighbors separately confront their intimate lives: Are they satisfied by their partners? Are they getting enough? Do they feel desired? “No” is an acceptable blanket answer. So when Florence, newly off her antidepressants to get her libido back, seduces a repairman (while managing to keep both their pants on), her morally questionable scheme to spice up her sex drive from home sets in motion a whole new daily routine for both women. As they devise new ways to meet men without raising suspicion from their nosy co-op, they each find ways of respecting their own need to be sexy: doing their hair, makeup, and getting dressed in flirtatious outfits. Robichaud shows us women who are unashamed of their adult bodies, their nudity, and their decisions.
“We created a pretty strong bond pretty quickly,” Gonthier-Hyndman says at the Q&A, referring to how she and Leboeuf dove into their roles involving intimate scenes and being naked on set. “I was wearing a pubic wig,” she adds, somewhat sheepishly, to uproar from around the room, “and that brought us very close.” Standing at either end of the line of cast and crew onstage, Leboeuf and Gonthier-Hyndman are dressed somewhat as the fantasies of their own characters: Leboeuf in a tight gray velvet jumpsuit, and Gonthier-Hyndman in a leotard piece over black tights, a long coat draped over her shoulders. For actors in a film about women getting pleasure, they aren’t backing down from feeling good at the premiere.
Dancing around the ethics of infidelity, Two Women asks: Who is unsatisfied with whom? Florence begins reading a lot of feminist theory, which she shares, elated, with Violette, convincing her that monogamy is a patriarchal scheme. What Violette doesn’t know is that her husband, traveling often for work, is sleeping with a younger colleague (Gariépy) on his trips, despite frequently defending his love for Violette and dropping everything to return home to her and their baby. Although the neighbors are each dealing with their own couples’ issues, exploring different modes of resolution, they are ultimately just four people individually trying to understand their personal desires by themselves, rather than with their partners. But through a converging of plotlines, their stories reach narrative climax not on their own, but together.
