The film starts with Sara breaking off with her fiancé Esau August. After this breakup, Sara starts to get interested in women, a pastime of hers that she hasn’t done since college. The film centers around the people she dates, including an ex-fiance August, Ali, who Sara meets in a coffee shop, and a married couple. And that’s pretty much the storyline. Sara goes out with different people, trying to sort out how she feels about her sexuality as well as relationships.
This film’s biggest problem centers around how carelessly romantic partners come to Sara. It is not something that I can identify with. While the character is shown to be socially awkward, it never seems to bother her to have an endless supply of suitors of any sex, including women. All the lesbians in this film are way too aggressive. That’s not true to life. Lesbians seldom initiate contact; they are too shy to do so. That is our entire dilemma! Yet, Sara is free of such dilemmas, especially in the early stages, she faces far too little rejection. That is hard to sympathize with. Some of the more relatable subjects are sexual ambiguity and dotage. Combining that with a character who can afford to travel on a liberal budget, with minimal restrictions, is quite shocking.
This connects to a big-picture problem with Women and Sometimes Men and it doesn’t have a conflict. I understand it’s mainly about a self-journey, but the movie feels like it lacks a common bond to link all these views together. Indeed, many of the scenes in this film were interesting to me on their own, but they did not coalesce into a satisfying whole. For this reason, the film appears to have no conclusion. In the absence of a central conflict, what is there to resolve?
In any case, it seems that Sara, if anything, actually gets worse as the film progresses. She is introduced as very socially inept, but quite endearing. However, as the film unfolds, she comes off as increasingly self-centered and whiny. And that’s practically all there is to it. The development of Sara as a character does not appear to be very pronounced in the course of the film. Also, the charmingly socially awkward moments dry up over the course of the film. So by the end, she is more odious than she was at the start. It seems like a baffling decision for a light-hearted comedy to make about its leading character.
My last concern with Women and Sometimes Men is how deeply essentialist it is. Sara dates people of both sexes and she, along with the other characters, constantly discusses how males and females are opposites. Men, for example, are rugged, have big hands, and speak simplistically. Women, on the other hand, have beautiful hair, are glamorous and intimidating, and smell lovely. This particular worldview leaves utterly no space for the thinkable women and men, not to mention non-binary individuals, existing outside the gendered framework. I do not claim that this film ought to have a non-binary character, but the sheer number of broad generalizations like how women and men are completely different began to wear on me. This film came out in 2018. Can you believe some people thought gender existed in 2018?
Women and Sometimes Men is one of those films that when it’s over, I sit back and wonder what the purpose of telling this story was. Sara was not interesting enough as a character to justify this directionless film. The only positive thing I can say is that at least it is quick.
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