How to Please a Woman is a spicy little sweetmeat of a film, the title of which sets out both the subject matter and the target audience.
An Australian production, it stars popular English actress Sally Phillips as Gina, who’s given an unusual birthday present by her friends - a male stripper.
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The girls go swimming together every week, and there’s much ribald fun at the idea of giving Gina the services of stripper Tom, who Gina prefers to use as a house cleaner.
In fact, Tom was planning to take it to the next level with Gina, so to speak, until she diverted him towards housework.
Gina’s home life with hubby Adrian is no great shakes. And nor is that of all the swimming buddies. They want something more.
You mean house-cleaning? Well yes, if this was a frothy Seventies sitcom. But these days everyone’s taking it to the next level. Oo-er!
So Gina chases up Tom the Stripper, and finds him working at a local moving company called, with magnificent obviousness, Pleased to Move You. But it seems they’re going out of business.
So, Gina offers them a spicy upgrade of their services. If you catch my drift.
Actually, as a mere male and therefore outside the Girl’s Night Out market, my attention also kept drifting throughout How to Please a Woman.
I wondered how this might have played out if the genders were reversed. You know, How to Please a Man, with female strippers and middle-aged male clients?
Don’t go there, is possibly the best advice here.
Anyway, the three newly-assigned sex workers-cum-cleaners are sent to work. There’s a fourth mover, the middle-aged but charming Steve, who doesn’t feel he’s up for the new job description.
For some reason, this seems to be a plus with Gina rather than a liability.
Meanwhile her swimming friends leap at the new service offered by Pleased to Move You. Taking a cue from Sigmund Freud’s famous conundrum “What do women want?” these women are more than willing to tell all.
And not only about activity in the boudoir. It seems that an almost as important part of How to Please a Woman is learning to clean the house properly.
For audiences frustrated at the lack of films featuring efficient, semi-naked vacuum cleaning, this film – written and directed by Renee Webster – fills that gap.
As far as the other glaring gap – appealing, halfway believable characters – How to Please a Woman finds itself once again relying on rather better performances than the script deserves.
Notably Phillips, who’s spent years playing characters like Gina on TV and in films like Bridget Jones, and knows how to add dimension to a character that otherwise doesn’t have any.
What the target audience wants, of course, is for Gina to get rid of her boring husband - I mean, Adrian, I ask you! - and stoke a fire under Steve the reluctant mover.
Since Steve is played by the always charming Erik Thomson, who can best be described as an Antipodean Colin Firth, there’s no real need to build his character up much more than that.
Interestingly for a film that proudly claims to take the stigma out of the sex industry, neither Gina nor Steve avail themselves of its services.
They prefer instead that least daring and most traditional of conclusions, the chaste happy ending. Jane Austen would approve, I’m sure.
