Claudia Karvan and Guy Pearce both do creditable jobs of affecting the mannerisms of the opposite gender, although one is never greatly convinced that the characters one met at the start of the film are the same ones that are incarnated in the other’s body. Guy Pearce’s introverted limp-wristedness becomes rather extreme – this was just after The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert (1994) and before L.A. Confidential (1997) and Memento (2000) where Pearce was still a relative international unknown – but the part does eventually grow on you.

The film does gently push a feminist agenda. In the end, it draws upon caricatures of gender roles typified by pop psychologists like John Gray – that women are caregivers and sensitive to emotion, while men are closed off to feeling and wrapped in their own world of external achievement. All men in the film are thus caricatured, for example. In order to make its points, the film has to stretch credibility. Claudia Karvan and Guy Pearce are so diametrically opposed as characters from the outset – and the script even openly acknowledges this – that you wonder what it is they see in one another and what keeps them together. The bias in the film is wholly toward sympathy for the woman’s point-of-view – it is pointedly only the male who learns and changes his ways from the experience. The film never concerns itself with what the woman learns and how the experience changes her – so centred is the film on her point-of-view being the correct one that it seems to assume by implication that there is nothing she need learn from the experience. For all its agenda, the film is not an unlikeable one.