SO. Your fortysomething husband has begun to work his abs. Drive a penis shaped car. Wear an earring, silk lined overcoats, a stringy ponytail, shades at dusk. Remortgaged the semi for a string of polo ponies, a key to Lillie's library, membership of a certain sleazy, golfing gang.

Chances are, it's nothing more than a pathetic attempt to turn back the years. But just to be on the safe side, go see a movie. No, silly - not with him. Round up some women friends, prepare to laugh but bring a notebook. Put the champagne on ice for afters.

The First Wives' Club is open for business and who knows who might figure in the next batch of recruits? It could be you - and if nothing else, you will be armed with that notebook, packed with a string of sharp, hilarious one liners guaranteed to scorch his ears as he slinks away to whatever fate and his bimbette have to throw at him.

Sure, this club was founded in Hollywood and set extravagantly in Manhattan - so can it be real? Well, take a look around your office/factory/supermarket. Concentrate on the men hitting the mid 40s and 50s. How many of them are chasing women 10 or more years younger or setting up house and having babies with them - these trophy wives, emblems of male potency and eternal youth? Start counting and be amazed.

Now ask yourself, whatever happened to the first wives? How were they finally "disappeared"? Did they move to Florida or a flat in Rathmines? End up in detox, jail, writing a bestseller or running a company in the Fortune 500?

The First Wives' Club serves up the answers any red blooded female of a certain age will want to hear - even it is does kick off with a ghastly cliche. This is when the alcohol numbed Cynthia dons a fur coat and high heels to fling herself from a penthouse balcony the day her ex husband marries some preschooler". But it serves a purpose. Her funeral is the magnet that draws her three old college friends together for the first time since the 1960s. Afterwards they go for lunch, this trio whose paths have taken radically different routes but who have one thing in common: money.

There's Brenda, played by a wholly believable, plumpish Bette Midler, with an adolescent son longing to see her reunited with his father - Morty, a menopausal, electrical appliances "king". Brenda gets all the best lines. When her eye lights on a window display featuring a teenchy little black dress, she shrieks: "Who'd wear that? Some anorexic teenager? A foetus." On sighting -Shelley - (triumphantly played by Sarah Jessica Parker), Monty's new bimbette, just about wearing the same little black dress, she snaps: "Well, the bulimia certainly paid off."

Then there's Elise (Goldie Hawn), an ageing actress so nipped and tucked and pumped with collagen that her mouth makes Miss Piggy's look quite dainty. Let's hear it again for Brenda who tells her: "Thanks to Cher's pioneering efforts, you still haven't hit puberty!" Elise's ex husband Bill is a sleazeball movie producer who uses the casting couch to pick up bimbos but is suing Elise for half her money anyway.

And there's Annie (Diane Keaton, still playing the stylish, non confrontational, buttoned up doormat), whose funny, supportive lesbian daughter cannot begin to understand why her mother still adores the cheating husband who treats her like a trash can. The lunch that begins so decorously finally sees them unravelling, wrecklessly, drunkenly, comically, as one by one these fortysomething women reveal the miserable wreckage of their lives. All have given their best years and energies to highly successful, high profile husbands who have unceremoniously dumped them for younger models. This is the bond and they recognise it instantly. The First Wives' Club is in session. Objective: revenge (which they prefer in these PC times to call "justice").

It's a film that could be cartoonish. At times it falters, and seriously threatens to sag under the weight of predictable Hollywood excesses. It's a romp to be sure, but one that pulls out issues such as failure, rejection and all sorts of personal demons and gives them a brief but merciless airing. At one point, Annie's smooth, charming ex has no sooner romanced her into bed and provoked a heartfelt declaration of love from her than he baldly announces that he wants a divorce. A man among us thought this incredible. But a (real) first wife wept and saw scorching truth in the scene as a desolate Annie walked away distressed as much by her own foolishness as by her husband's villainous dishonesty.

The marriage counsellor among us saw nothing cartoonish in the scene either. Insensitive men? Sure. She sees them often enough the sort of man who sees nothing wrong with giving his new love a copy of the bracelet he gave his wife on their 25th anniversary - and doesn't bother to conceal it.

The infrequent but telling appearances of Brenda's son also salted raw sensitivities: his obvious yearning to be a family again, her desperate need to reassure, him, not to embarrass him not to demonise his father. The hammer blow of recognition (for another first wife in our company) when the boy tells his mother that his father and Shelley are getting married. But Brenda hangs in there, clinging to the wreckage and her "sizeist" sense of humour. When Morty sails into the son's bar mitzvah with the skimpily dressed young Shelley on his arm, Brenda hisses: "He brought her to my son's Bar Mitzvah - is she a gift." Later, when Morty appears minus the barracuda, Brenda asks: "Where's your little girlfriend, Morty?" "She's waiting in the car. "Where in the glove compartment?"

WELL, Shelley gets her comeuppance in the end, ably assisted by the magnificent Maggie Smith. Of course, it's a feel good fantasy. Who, for one has the wads of money needed to pull off these women's mighty coups? But Thelma And Louise was fantasy too - and that sure felt good. And what can be wrong with a fantasy that conveys the message that we needn't be our mothers - that we needn't slink off into shadows, rejection daubed across our retreating backs?

In fact, the fantasies woven through The First Wives Club are probably a good deal less self deluding and damaging than (some) men's mid life crises, grasping at potency and eternal youth through babes and babies.

The First Wives Chub is a story about women, about friendship, about solidarity in distress. There is also a message right through it that should make men sit up and take notice. During pre divorce referendum interviews in Ireland last year, a senior family law barrister and I were discussing serial adulterers, those men who form relationships, have babies and leave - over and over. How to stop them? "Get everything. That's how to stop them, said the barrister.

Well, it's right there in the script - from no less a personage than Ivana Trump, first wife extraordinaire. Her advice? "Be, strong, be independent," she says. "And don't get mad, get everything."