Leo Grande may not address that first issue, but, even at home, helps to make up for the second. One theory is that this stems from (a) the ready availability of online pornography, which makes mainstream sex scenes almost vestigial for purposes of titillation and (b) the abandonment by film studios of Serious Adult Dramas. There’s been a fair amount of conversation recently about why Hollywood films have shied away from depicting sex on screen in recent years. But she’s empty inside, and what Leo Grande makes more explicit than other similar stories is that this emptiness is intimately connected to the fact that she’s never had an orgasm.
She’s an utterly mainstream figure at first blush, having taught religious studies and raised two apparently successful children. Despite its title, this is Nancy’s story, and it’s one that almost never gets told in commercial films. Leo Grande is the first produced screenplay written by British comic actor Katy Brand, and is the third feature directed by Australian filmmaker Sophie Hyde, both of whom are women.
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Which is not to say the movie treats their perspectives equally.
McCormack, impressively enough, matches her, as Leo initially appears to be an idealized, even angelic example of his profession until some of the cracks in his façade begin to show as well. Thompson, for her part, performs a fascinating figurative striptease, starting off as a recognizable iteration of a character she’s played many times and ending up as something much rawer and braver. It’s essentially a two-handed, one-location tale, so the focus falls hard on both Thompson, a legend, and McCormack, a movie newcomer previously best known for a role on Peaky Blinders. Over the course of four meetings in the same hotel room, Nancy and Leo (Daryl McCormack) gradually reveal themselves to each other, physically and otherwise, resulting in a film that treats with refreshing respect a pair of populations: women on the other side of middle age and sex workers. The Leo Grande of the title is a young man who has been hired by widowed schoolteacher Nancy Stokes (Emma Thompson) to provide her with some of the sexual fulfillment she missed out on during her 31-year, mandatory-missionary marriage. (See also: the entertaining queer romcom Fire Island, which bowed on the same platform last week.) Good Luck to You, Leo Grande, for instance, is debuting exclusively on Hulu, even though it’s a Searchlight Pictures production.
Of course, these films can’t all be seen in theaters, which seem to have largely given up on luring anyone over the age of 30. They’re not all masterpieces, but these days they’re enough of a novelty to merit notice. Believe it or not, they still make movies for grownups that don’t make you want to stick your head in the sand. IT’S NOT ALL DOOM and gloom and body horror and dinosaurs and fighter jets out there in movieland. Daryl McCormack and Emma Thompson in “ Good Luck to You, Leo Grande.”