Emma Thompson wants to start a conversation
NEW YORK – The summer movie season has not, traditionally speaking, been known for its nuanced attention to female sexuality. But in the middle of Hollywood’s masculine thrill rides and sci-fi fantasies this year is “Good Luck to You, Leo Grande,” a compassionate comedy in which Emma Thompson stars as a widow seeking romantic excitement with a suave sex worker, played by newcomer Daryl Mccormack. The film, a Searchlight Pictures release to debut June 14 on Hulu, is an intimate two-hander coursing with many seldom discussed issues of sexuality and shame, pleasure and repression.
“It’s like a little atom bomb,” says Thompson, speaking by Zoom from Scotland. “As it divides the cell, it reaches people who are very energized by it because there’s so much to talk about. It pushes so many particular buttons in our minds.”
Directed by Sophie Hyde and penned by Katy Brand, the film takes place almost entirely in a London hotel room where Nancy (Thompson) and Leo (Mccormack) meet on four occasions. Nancy, a religious studies teacher, has never had an orgasm. She has deep-seated insecurities about her body and has spent a lifetime suppressing her own desires. Leo, on the other hand, is calmly welladjusted and believes unapologetically in giving satisfaction to others.
To Thompson, “Good Luck to You, Leo Grande” is nothing less than revolutionary in its willingness to be candid about topics usually brushed under the covers. “Let’s face it, women’s pleasure has never been, as it were, top of the todo list in present systems,” says Thompson. “It’s never been: Oh, we really must attend to that.”
It’s a open, probing performance by the 63-year-old Thompson whose screen presence has long exuded, as The New York Times once summarized, “an ironclad sense of self and how things ought to be.” But whereas many of Thompson’s most iconic roles (“Howard’s End,” “Sense and Sensibility”) have situated her intelligent, empathetic moral clarity, “Leo Grande” proves she’s just as clear-eyed when it comes to matters of sex and pleasure. “I’ve always trusted physical pleasure, as long as it felt right in the emotional centers of the body. I never thought that’s the wrong thing to do,” says Thompson. “Pleasuring yourself is fantastic. That’s just extraordinary that one can do that. If you think about the history of masturbation, it’s simply appalling what was done it by Christian faith, and I’m sure other faiths. The fact that it outlawed pleasure for the self, for the body, seems to me to be deeply, deeply problematic and a terrible sin, a real evil thing to do to human beings. We’re designed to experience pleasure, clearly.”
Thompson has, she says, been thinking about the issues behind “Leo Grande” for years. When the script arrived, the role, she says, “struck me in the same way Margaret Schlegel struck me when I was 30,” referring to her Oscar-winning performance in James Ivory and Ismail Merchant’s 1992 period drama “Howard’s End.” Years ago, Thompson made a handbook for her daughter as a guide to discussing sex apart from the way it’s categorized by society. “We find it difficult to be honest about sex. It’s difficult to talk about. It’s been made somewhat taboo, and at the same time, it’s been industrialized and sold to us like Spam in a tin,” says Thompson. “I was talking about the pleasure centers in the brain, in the body and in the heart. They’re very, very important because it’s not just one. It’s quite rare for all of those things to be stimulated in the right way at the same time. We’re so complicated, aren’t we, and we’re so unwilling to recognize that complication just because it makes life more difficult. But actually in the end, it makes life more interesting.”