MILF (2018)

Three women of a certain age descend on the Cote d'Azur to empty a holiday house before it is sold, and within days they are being pursued by three young men from the local sailing club. That is the whole of the premise, and the film has the good sense not to pretend otherwise. Axelle Laffont directs herself alongside Virginie Ledoyen and Marie-Josee Croze, which makes this a rare mainstream comedy built around actresses in their forties and framed, more or less deliberately, through their own desire instead of the leering of some unseen adolescent. The men are the scenery here. It is a modest inversion, but it is an inversion.

The cast is uniformly white and uniformly French, and the film has no interest in anything beyond the sand and the bedroom. No racial commentary, no environmental hand-wringing, no structural critique of the property market that sets the plot in motion. The holiday house is a device for getting everyone to the coast, nothing more. What the film does offer, faintly, is a case for the continued desirability of women past forty, though it makes that case through the admiration of young men instead of any argument about how bodies are permitted to look. It is age-positivity wearing a bikini, which is not the same project as body acceptance, and we should not confuse the two.

Above all, this is a light summer comedy that wants to amuse and never to instruct. Any message arrives by accident and leaves quickly. The reviews were unkind (fourteen percent, if we are counting), the box office was small, and the film slid quietly onto streaming two years later, where it presumably found the audience it deserved. Three women, three young men, one house, no sermons. There are worse ways to spend ninety minutes, and more earnest ones.