Perspective: Emma Thompson wants us to like our bodies. She knows it’s hard.
,” at least “a step in the [right] direction.” She plays Nancy Stokes, a widow and retired teacher who hires a sex worker named Leo Grande to help break her out of a lifetime of sexual repression. Over the course of four meetings in an anonymous-looking hotel room, the two embark on an unlikely ally-ship, with Nancy eventually discovering, like Dorothy in Oz, that when it comes to fulfillment — sexual or otherwise — there’s no place like home.
What happens in this movie is a seismic shift that feels personal but also generational: Leo is an avatar of a generation known for questioning conventional ideas about gender roles, binary identities and patriarchal power dynamics. The moment Leo walks through Nancy’s hotel room door, he asks for her permission to kiss her on the cheek — a recurring motif throughout the film.
McCormack plays Leo with a seductive combination of physical confidence and tenderness; when the camera is on his perfectly sculpted physique, the point of view feels admiring but not leering. Hyde says she studied the 2017 “Call Me By Your Name” for cues on how to film actors in a way that allows them to be both subject and object.atwith him all the time?’” she explains.
Thompson is keenly aware of how subversive it is for a woman her age to dare to be nude, especially in a medium whose foundational grammar is based on the display of women’s bodies. “Impossible bodies,” Thompson notes, “either because they naturally belong to the very young women who are in the films, or [they’re] bodies of old women who do nothing but restrict what they eat and go to the gym.”