It’s Raining Men

Writer and Director: Caroline Vignal

About an hour into It’s Raining Men writer/director Caroline Vignal stages a fantasy song and dance version of the title song that sums up the breezy yet realistic attitude to sex taken by the movie. The lyrics of the song are tweaked to remind viewers one cannot expect physical perfection in lovers but sometimes have to take the rough with the smooth and the dancers are dressed in mundane casualwear rather than provocative clothing.

The marriage between Iris Beaulieu (Laure Calamy) and husband Stéphane (Vincent Elbaz) has become stale. He takes his laptop to bed to finish off work while she reads novels with titles summing up her barren sex life ranging from ‘The Frozen Woman’ through female desire to reinventing love. It is so long since Iris had sex a visit to her osteopath becomes a sensual almost sexual experience.

A friend encourages Iris to dress more provocatively, but instead she takes the advice of a stranger and subscribes to a dating app under the pseudonym ‘Isis’. Iris’s life is transformed by her infidelity- realising men see her as desirable helps her perceive herself in the same way. However, Iris’s increasingly liberated attitude begins to intrude upon her family life.

Writer/director Caroline Vignal takes a comedic rather than romantic or judgemental approach to the subject matter. Sex is portrayed in a realistic manner; none of Iris’s lovers has the perfectly toned physique one might expect in a film of this nature. Sex scenes are played for laughs rather than arousal. A strip tease by a wannabe Lothario who boasts of giving a woman a six-hour orgasm is more ‘Full Monty’ endearing than stimulating. Iris is reduced to helpless giggles taking photos of her backside for the dating profile.

Director Vignal films from Iris’s viewpoint. Passengers on the bus articulate replies to Iris’s profile on the dating app leaving her flustered but flattered.

However, It’s Raining Men struggles a bit when stepping outside Iris’s immediate viewpoint to wider issues. Iris is incredibly lucky all of her liaisons are positive and there are no intimidating or threatening encounters. To an extent Iris is saved by her naivety, she escapes unscathed from an encounter with a partner wanting to engage in bondage as he loses interest because she is so preoccupied talking about her husband’s lacklustre attitude. She is able to deter a potential stalker by quoting from her daughter’s civics class on how to say ‘no’ effectively.

A crisis is reached when the increasingly freethinking Iris challenges the cautious approach of her teenage daughter and encourages her to be more outgoing and take greater risks. Director Vignal uses the scene as a turning point at which Iris comes to perceive she is risking her family’s happiness with her affairs but even so, the sequence feels out of place in such a warm and appealing movie.

Laure Calamy is utterly charming as Iris, her wide-eyed and amused reactions make Iris’s journey from frustration to seductress are both convincing and hilarious but it is her generous free-spirited nature, which makes Iris such an engaging character.

It’s Raining Men is not a typical sex comedy. Guilt does not force the characters into farcical situations and no one gets caught with their trousers down. The surprisingly nonchalant attitude to infidelity is refreshing and, matched with an engaging and very funny central performance, makes for a light-hearted gem of a movie.

It’s Raining Men is released in UK & Irish cinemas 10th January 2025.