Film Review: How to Please a Woman
Images courtesy of Madman Entertainment and NIX co Publishing.
Gina Henderson (Sally Phillips) is a woman unsatisfied; on the wrong side of fifty, her daughter has left the nest, her husband Adrian (Cameron Daddo) is too tired for sex, and her job prospects are slim. After a cheeky birthday present from her single friends at her swim club, in the form of stripper Tom (Alexander England), offers to do…anything…for her, what she really wants…really wants…is for him to clean her house.
Amused and delighted, her friends wish for a sexy cleaner themselves; feeling guilty at the revelation that Tom also works for a removalist company that Gina was involved in liquidating, and having just lost her own job, Gina embarks on a new career, transforming him and his co-workers Anthony (Ryan Johnson), Ben (Josh Thomson), and their boss Steve (Erik Thomson), from well-built removalists to well-built cleaners…with extras.
So how do you please a woman? It’s a question that has been asked by men for years, and you’re not going to get answers here; at one point it’s very clearly stated by Gina that what any given woman wants varies greatly, and that’s a theme writer/director Renèe Webster maintains throughout the course of the film (although according to a flower seller in the third act of the film, doing the housework, “gets ‘em every time”). For Gina it seems to be human connection, something that is definitely missing in her relationship with Adrian.
I’m probably missing the point, but I found Adrian to be quite an interesting – albeit minor – character. There’s a lot about him that screams unhappy/sexless marriage trope, but there are some twists to that concept that I’m not going to spoil that add a dimensional depth. That being said, he quickly undoes this character development, although from a narrative angle it’s very easy to understand why.
How to Please a Woman is nominally a comedy, but there are few particularly funny moments; the scene in which Gina asks Tom to clean her house is laden with all the expected innuendo, especially when she instructs him on – *nudge* *nudge* - how to polish a table, and I found myself almost joining in. Having said that, there’s a very predictable scene involving a remote control vibrator that in spite of myself made me laugh out loud.
It seems a bit of a shame that a film with such a good premise – a female run, male only “cleaning” service that offers women pleasure in whatever form that takes – doesn’t really cover any new or original ground. There’s some minor, fleeting discussion of sex work from the male perspective, but it’s so late in the film, so brief, and so tongue-in-cheek as to be blink-and-you’d-miss-it. I must confess that I am probably not the target audience, and perhaps I am therefore a lot more critical than the film deserves, so I should add that I thought the cast gave excellent performances with that they had, the characters were believable and relatable, and although clichéd in places the writing was solid. I understand this is a directorial debut for Webster, and I look forward to seeing more from her in future.
How to Please a Woman is screening in cinemas nationwide from Thursday the 19th May. For tickets and more info, click here.