Wingwomen (2023)

Wingwomen comes to us from France by way of a graphic novel (La Grande Odalisque), a woman in the director's chair (Mélanie Laurent, who also stars), and three women occupying a genre traditionally reserved for men in well-pressed suits. Carole and Alex lift paintings for a shadowy patron known as The Godmother until Carole's pregnancy inspires a retirement plan, which naturally summons the obligatory final job. Sam, a widowed race car driver, is recruited as the getaway. The chassis is familiar. The engine hums.

The bond between Carole and Alex is the film's true subject, a friendship intense enough to power the plot, and it stays firmly within the bounds of friendship. No romance is offered or implied. Manon Bresch's Sam takes a lead position, and the film never comments on her race, which reads as either quiet confidence or simple disinterest. The thieves rob the wealthy, though the screenplay advances no argument about wealth itself; the money is a payday, not a system. Carole's pregnancy functions as a clock, not a statement about bodies, and the wider culture-war furniture is entirely absent. No sermons, no causes, no history in need of correction.

Laurent directs with a light hand and a fondness for montage, keeping the sermonizing to a minimum. This is a breezy, stylish picture that would sooner show a car chase than a lesson, and its pleasures are modest and real. The closing act reaches for genuine feeling and mostly earns it, though the sentiment sits oddly beside the earlier cool. It is a competent, watchable exercise in genre, distinguished chiefly by who is holding the guns. The classification is unremarkable, which is its own kind of result.

{"thematic_tags": ["book_adaptation"]}