When women bond in movies, usually it’s over the lousiness of the men in their lives. “Just Like a Woman” from Rachid Bouchareb (“Days of Glory”) seems to fit the pattern — at first.
Chicago secretary Marilyn (Sienna Miller) gets fired without pay and discovers her layabout husband (Jesse Bob Harper) getting it on with another woman. Her acquaintance Mona (Golshifteh Farahani of “Chicken With Plums”) is married to a kind man, but his mother (wonderful Chafia Boudraa, who pulls her head toward her shoulders like a gargoyle atop Notre Dame) is a horror. Mona mixes up the old bat’s heart medicine, with fatal results, and winds up on the run. She meets up with the disgruntled Marilyn — and away they go, car top down as they fly across the desert Southwest.
So far, so “Thelma & Louise,” but with a big, lovely difference: Marilyn is a belly dancer, and Mona somewhere has picked up the skill, too. They make a living by performing in down-at-the-heels clubs and restaurants, their sensuality and joy in this ancient art somehow transcending the sleazy settings. (There’s even a shoutout to the great Egyptian dancer Samia Gamal; bless Bouchareb for that.)
It’s a wispy movie that does not end so much as peter out, and it could have benefited from a little more humor and a little less heinous male behavior. Miller and Farahani, though — both sometimes used previously as decoration — give strong performances as women bonding over their delight in both movement and their own beauty.