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(Riverside Studios, 101 Queen Caroline Street, Hammersmith, London, W6 9BN, FRIDAY 17 - THURSDAY 23 JUNE 2022)
https://riversidestudios.co.uk/see-and-do/good-luck-to-you-leo-grande-33853/
"Good Luck To You Leo Grande"
Nancy Stokes (Emma Thompson) is a retired teacher. Leo Grande (Daryl McCormack) is a sex worker As Nancy embarks on a post-marital sexual awakening and Leo draws on his skills and charm, together they find a surprising human connection.
A woman of around 60 is waiting in a hotel room for a young man that she has booked to have sex with. This woman is waiting, and the guy coming up and you're just hearing this soft knock on the door and she opens the door. Nancy is a 60-ish retired religious education teacher who’s been widowed for 2 years and who makes this sort of fabulously bold and unusual decision to hire a younger sex worker. She's brave but also deeply flawed. So many of her beliefs are the opposite of woke which we love because that’s sort of 90% of the population. It’s not uncommon, her attitudes, her prejudices, her biases. She's just a normal person who initiates this very strangely not-romantic relationship. Nancy obeyed the rules her whole life; she's what you would describe as a pillar of society. She's conducted herself incredibly well, she's had a long, successful 31-year-old marriage. She's got two children. She had a long career in religious education. She's unflinchingly honest about her own discomfort around sex and determined to explore what it could be. She can be abrasive and seem uncaring, but over the film she grows to understand that she may have perpetuated values she didn’t believe in. She may have accepted and reinforced a status quo that's unhelpful to those around her and also to herself. This is as much of an awakening as her physical one.
Leo Grande is a modern young man who makes a living as a sex worker and meets Nancy after she books him for a session. He's someone who navigates his own identity and pleasure so openly, it’s his superpower. He’s had his own experiences with sexual shame, and in response to that he empowered himself. He uses his expressiveness and his own sexual desires to help others discover theirs. Nancy is a woman who has been pretty much starved of healthy and beautiful sexual experience and Leo has found a vocation in helping to introduce that to his clients and help them see their own power through sexuality. Different generations don’t necessarily have the same understanding around sex and pleasure, which is also something we explore. It’s a topic that has affected Leo personally and he’s able to take those experiences and use it as momentum for himself to find his own identity. It also helps him with Nancy, and working with her to understand these parts of herself for the first time. Leo has a full life and a past that he doesn’t share with his clients and that shape who he's, but he also creates lines for himself within his work like you should in any professional setting. His boundaries are clear, but he's also having a human connection which sometimes doesn’t follow the rules. He's able to decide how to respond to a boundary crossed.
What do you want, really? How do you experience pleasure? Do you allow yourself to experience pleasure, and if you don’t then why not? Where do you carry your shame and why are you ashamed? Why are pain and pleasure and shame so inextricably linked? "Leo Grande" creates a hotel room that's modern-ish, which means something that isn't’t luxurious, and didn’t have heaps of colour. The hotel room doesn’t have any revelation of character like you’d have in somebody’s home for instance. The room feels cheap looking, all while maintaining a visually entertaining space. Given that "Leo Grande" largely takes place in one room, the film feels claustrophobic. There's lots of really tactile fabrics in there. At the beginning there's a kind of very symmetrical style and then by the end that gets a little bit messier. And there's certain very particular scenes where we've the camera handheld instead of being on the dolly, which is what we're seeing most of the time. It's a script that approaches sex in a sometimes comedic way.
The film is simple, two actors in one room exploring intimacy, connection, sex, frustration, and shifting power dynamics, but in our currently divided world, these intimate stories about connection feel even more vital. Our bodies, our shame, our mis-communications, our sexual connections, and sexual frustrations are often tragic, and we believe we are longing for stories that reflect us and challenge us and allow us to consider how we treat each other. There's much to be said between two characters who meet to have good sex, and much that cannot be expressed in words. We love to work with desire, our wants and needs, the way our wants compete with each other and the way we try to reject them or embrace them. To get past that's a lot of freedom.
How can the film makes sure that we’re consulting sex workers, that’s not harmful, that’s perhaps empowering in some way. Sex and the body are fundamental to the film and having been soaked in a culture that teaches us to be ashamed and want to control and change our bodies. A lot of our societal constructions make it impossible for us to be present and we think that’s also what the film starts to address. If you weren’t following the rules, what would you want? How would you express it and how would you find it? It could be a reminder that someone unlikely might free you from your own limitations in a small but significant way.
Written by Gregory Mann