How to Please a Woman, review: a doggedly mediocre sex comedy that doesn’t move the earth

Fifty-something office worker Gina (Sally Phillips) hasn’t hit the menopause in suburban Perth quite yet, but she might as well have. Feeling invisible, even to her checked-out husband (Cameron Daddo), she has all but forgotten what it’s like to be touched, experience love, or receive it back.

When her gossipy friends send a stripper (Alexander England) to her porch one afternoon as a birthday present, he says he’ll do anything. Unprepared but also unashamed, Gina takes his words as an excuse to put her feet up while this baffled beefcake cleans her entire house.

From this seed – since Gina’s just been sacked – a business plan sprouts. A quartet of recently unemployed guys sign on to become domestic helpers, who’ll earn extra if they disrobe, and even more if they step up to bedroom duties. Before you can say The Full Monty, dimly remember Risky Business, or demand Magic Mike instead, Gina is essentially pimping this lot out on the sly, and has a whole army of desperate housewives queuing up for their services.

The oddity, and pretty much sole selling point here, is Phillips, a delightful stalwart of British telly for years, fronting a coy Australian sex comedy of almost dogged, determined mediocrity. Writer-director Renée Webster is at least to be credited with grasping her star’s flummoxed appeal in a rare leading role.

It’s a tough ask to secure sympathy for a woman who begins her film drifting through life like a zombie, but Phillips is up to it: she slyly underplays, then starts getting a kick out of the wake-up call.

It’s just so massively dated. For all the flaunting of sex positivity as the best thing since sliced bread here, the film makes you wonder when they think sliced bread came in, exactly. Calendar Girls (2003) starts to look practically avant-garde. I was reminded, too, of the same director’s Saving Grace (2000), a sleeper hit (it later spawned ITV’s Doc Martin) which had Brenda Blethyn as a middle-aged widow caught growing cannabis in her greenhouse. That had a similar tiptoeing, careful-not-to-offend naughtiness.

Phillips does heroically well, to be fair, with the cheekiest set-piece, which entails Gina test-driving a pop-it-in vibrator with the unwitting help of her employee Steve (Erik Thomson), a reticent silver fox who has the remote control buzzing in his pocket. The scenes with Hayley (Hayley McElhinney, looking alive) teaching the well-endowed but clueless Anthony (Ryan Johnson) how to put his body to better use are quite sweet.

The filmmaking is hardly guilty of anything all that reprehensible, other than being flaccid, familiar to the core, and unhelpfully lacking in sparkle. With so many scenes of liberating banter shot inside a ladies’ shower facility, they might have chosen one that didn’t look as though this lot were mischievously entertaining one other in a PoW camp.

Cert 15; on Sky Cinema from Friday 8th July