The film is written by British comedian and actor Katy Brand and directed by Australian film-maker Sophie Hyde. Hyde was faced with an enormous challenge with this script in that the film is almost entirely set in a very dull-looking hotel room. It won't be winning any awards for set design or wardrobe - even the one scene outside the hotel room is in a very boring-looking coffee lounge. The mundane aesthetic is obviously a creative decision. It forces the audience to completely invest in the minutiae of the developing relationship on screen as there aren't any pretty things or visual wizardry to distract them from these two characters.
This is where Thompson's comedic skills shine. She's very funny in her bumbling, nervous chit-chat and her to-ing and fro-ing as to whether she's going to go through with it. Greg thought that McCormack's performance was a bit one-note but to me that was the character. Leo Grande is a blank slate, a very good-looking blank slate, on to which his clients can project their fantasies. I think McCormack's perfectly calibrated come hither look may also have been lost on Greg.
I won't call Thompson's performance brave. Too often women who aren't size eight 20-year-olds and who dare to be sexual or naked on camera are told they're brave. It's a backhanded way of telling them they should be more ashamed of themselves and their bodies. Nevertheless, we rarely if ever see a woman in her 60s as a sexual being on screen and so in that way this film is radical. Radical realism.
HE SAW
We were maybe 15 minutes into the movie when it became increasingly clear the entire thing was going to take place in a hotel room and I found myself fighting down an irrational resistance to this kind of set-up that presumably formed when I was young and irrationally interested in explosions, but had nevertheless persisted, for whatever reason.
It worked, in spite of my predilections, probably because the dialogue was very good and the main characters interesting and the discussion between them constantly perched on the edge of disaster. Most of the movie is discussion about, or in anticipation of, sex. Eventually the sex takes place and then, in the final reveal, the film's big cultural moment, Emma Thompson drops her robe and stands completely naked in front of a mirror, appreciating her body with both eyes and hands.
Zanna told me a while back that she'd heard somewhere that while heterosexual women are most attracted to men who are roughly their age, heterosexual men are most attracted to women who are 20. I have just now googled this and it appears to be true - or at least based on solid research. The follow-up question is: Is the explanation for this embarrassing phenomenon biological or cultural?
I was shocked when Thompson took off her robe, but why? I guess because it's so rare to see a woman in her 60s naked on screen. But why is it rare? This is this movie's great strength, that it makes us reflect on questions such as these and on received notions of beauty, and why the group of people who are most frequently naked on screen are young women. These are important questions to ask and they are difficult to answer and this is one of the great things about a good movie: that it forces us to challenge our thinking, especially when it's the type of thinking that has clearly been affected by long years spent watching movies that have no interest in challenging our thinking.
The movie builds to its climax slowly and almost painfully, with steady rises and releases of tension as the leads have multiple moments of coming together and separating, before finally finding in each other something they've been looking for. The ultimate release is visceral and we leave this movie feeling that something has just shifted for the better, and not just in Thompson - and that's something we should celebrate.
Good Luck to You, Leo Grande is in cinemas now.
