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Chloé Robichaud’s new film is a remake of the 1970 French-Canadian sex comedy of the same name (the French title is Deux Femmes en Or) and it hasn’t travelled well: silly, clumsy and dated.

Florence (Karine Gonthier-Hyndman) and Violette (Laurence Leboeuf) are two unsatisfied women who live next door to each other in a bland suburban condo development. Violette has just had a baby, and her husband Benoît (Félix Moati) is always away, supposedly on business, but actually having hotel-room assignations with a woman called Eli, played by Juliette Gariépy – an actress with cult status for her chilling lead performance in the psychological thriller Red Rooms. As for Florence, she has no children but is also unhappy with her bland sexless relationship with David (Mani Soleymanlou); she comes off her antidepressants to let her long-repressed wild side run free.

The two women become friends and, without ever quite discussing it as a specific plan, start having sex while their partners are away with guys they get into their apartments to do repairs or odd jobs or buy stuff they’ve put up for sale online. The resulting sex scenes feel weirdly both cynical and naive: not quite sexy enough to count as softcore erotica, nor real enough to be in any way plausible as drama. It is like a serious Francophone version of the Confessions of a Window Cleaner films, and the scene in which a drunk Florence demonstrates how bleeding occurs when you cut your wrist with a broken bottle is unintentionally very strange.

There are one or two interesting moments: including an intriguing discussion of the idea that Tinder is anti-love and in fact just promotes addiction to the app, which is inimical to actually finding a long-term partner. But really this is a very tiring and mediocre film.

• Two Women is in UK cinemas from 3 April.