In a searing indictment of the human condition, the new workplace comedy dares to plunge audiences into an unrecognizable dystopia where a woman possesses a corner office.
To comprehend the sheer ontological terror of the new Sacha Baron Cohen vehicle Ladies First, one must first situate it within the broader tapestry of existential inversion; it is a spiritual successor not only to the suffocating bureaucratic despair of Franz Kafka’s The Trial, but also to the seminal 1928 Weimar expressionist short Die Kaffeepause, and, somewhat inexplicably, the 1998 cinematic triumph Air Bud: Golden Receiver, all of which grapple with the devastating consequences of placing a historically marginalized figure into a position of unearned athletic or corporate authority.
Here, we find Cohen, a performer of profound physical pathos, stripped of his masculine agency and subjected to the harrowing, almost Pasolinian torture of being asked by his boss, played by Rosamund Pike, if he has the bandwidth for a quick sync. The camera lingers, almost sadistically, on his trembling hands as he attempts to operate the office espresso machine, a visual motif that forces the viewer—who, I must assume, has never previously considered the concept of gender dynamics, given the general intellectual poverty of the modern multiplex—to confront the fragility of the patriarchal ego.
It is a cinema of cruelty, an unrelenting assault on the senses that asks us to imagine a universe where a woman speaks at a normal volume during a marketing stand-up.
Pike, for her part, delivers a performance of chilling, sociopathic detachment, embodying the role of a female CEO with the sort of terrifyingly blank neutrality we have previously only seen in the most punishing durational theater; when she instructs Cohen to circle back on the third-quarter deliverables, she does so with a cold, dead-eyed authority that strips away the very illusion of human connection, leaving only the yawning void of corporate matriarchy in its wake.
One cannot help but marvel at the audacity required to construct a narrative around a female executive who expects her male assistant to remember her salad order. It is a narrative choice so utterly divorced from the natural order that it borders on the sublime, challenging the very structural foundations of Western dramaturgy by suggesting that a man might, under certain apocalyptic conditions, have to apologize for interrupting.