It’s Raining Men review – Laure Calamy adultery comedy puts the heat in cheat

The star quality of Laure Calamy has been an open secret since the runaway success of the French TV comedy Dix Pour Cent, bought by Netflix and renamed Call My Agent!, in which she played Noémie, the ditsy assistant to the head of a talent agency. Since then she has appeared in a number of sugary French films of which, sadly, this is another, but her distinctive style and light comic touch elevates it a little.

Calamy is Iris, a dentist married to handsome Stéphane (Vincent Elbaz), with two teen daughters, living in a stylish Paris apartment. But their relationship is now sexless and Iris experiences a midlife crisis, yearning for the sophisticated French sex-comedy equivalent of piña coladas and getting caught in the rain. So Iris downloads a dating app for married cheaters and embarks on a series of secret, lighthearted one-night stands.

It’s silly and flimsy but sometimes oddly daring; director and co-writer Caroline Vignal coolly protracts certain scenes, extracting their potential for softcore eroticism where the standard-issue romcom would cut smartly away, having coyly established what was going to happen. The original French title is Iris et les Hommes, or Iris and the Men, but it’s been renamed for the English-language market with the title of the Weather Girls’ dancefloor classic, which a postcoitally euphoric Iris sings in the street in a fantasy-musical sequence. Again, not a bad moment by any means, although elsewhere the non-sex scenes are a bit cumbersome.

It’s worth pointing out a very French aspect to all this. Despite the movie’s obvious sentimental narrative direction towards the restitution of monogamy, it doesn’t have the solemn Anglo-Hollywood need for the cheater always to be solemnly exposed and shamed. Here, cheating can just remain undiscovered, briskly passed over as a phase or a secret learning experience.