'MILF' Review: Axelle Laffont's trite sex comedy offers nudity, vulgar jokes in the name of female empowerment
Spoilers for 'MILF'
There's the male gaze and then there is French actress and comedian Axelle Laffont's female gaze in her debut feature 'MILF' where she practically struggles to keep the camera off the nude bodies of the titular three women (including herself) on the screen. Starring alongside Virginie Ledoyen and Marie-Josee Croze in her feature directing debut, Laffont has reduced some of French cinema's finest to roles so measly that female empowerment is mistaken for crude, vulgar jokes that one would familiarize with a genre mostly dominated by men.
Perhaps Laffon tried giving her own voice to a typically redundant plot of self-exploration through sexuality in their 40s, the way we saw Liz Gilbert do in 'Eat Pray Love', but the outcome is far from appetizing. Given that the term 'Milf' is not actually a derogatory slang in French, it's hard to understand why two milfs and a widow would find gratification only when much younger men find them hot. A twisted tale of power dynamics satirizing the age-old trope of men dating women half their age? Still not justifiable.
Laffont stars as Elise, a single mother who accompanies her two best friends Sonia (Croze) and Cecile (Ledoyen) to a long summer holiday at the latter's beach house in the French Riviera. The three women waste no time in flaunting their taut abs and ample skin but instead of a free-spirited rendezvous with finding oneself and having some fun, it just comes off as a poor attempt to woo men whose abs do all the acting.
Pubic hair, masturbation, and orgasms, oral sex, and penis size are some of the elements explored when it comes to the many jokes our titular Milfs try to crack, each landing worse than the previous in a plot that looks just one step away from being mainstream soft porn. Scratch that. It is mainstream soft porn given the amount of time the camera focuses on Laffont's own body. And while we're here for all the self-love and body positivity, minutes into the film, it becomes even more confusing why Laffont would spend time, effort, or even energy in making a comedy that's not even funny. Seriously, punchlines go as menial as "I’m trying to make you squirt" and pick-up lines go about as romantic as "You're not a cougar, you're a milf!" Cue the fans and because we are hot and bothered! Not.
It's no wonder that when the movie hit French cinemas in 2018, local box office returns were less than poor considering its $5 million budget. It might find its right kind of audience on streaming pioneer and topless-central Netflix, but considering the only developmental arc one of the characters gets throughout the movie is embracing promiscuity as a widow, we're not sure how the woke audience will receive it.
Let's not even get started on the men these seemingly well to do, successful women fall for. While one can argue that Laffont's intent was perhaps to explore a niche where a woman just wants to be desired, men addicted to porn websites with vapid tattoos and no zero real-life concepts of intercourse really don't sound like panty-drop material. What's more tragic is the women, ironically, thinkin' tee-shirts saying "I’m a virgin. (This is a very old T-shirt.)" are cool and edgy. Like, ok boomer.
'MILF' is available for streaming from July 16 only on Netflix.