Sex on Screen
5 minute read
Good Luck, Leo Grande is Emma Thompson’s latest movie and it’s wonderful. It’s the type of film that you should encourage your partner/kids/needy cat out of the house before watching, pour a glass of something lovely and lie back and enjoy.
The film is written and created by the brilliant actress and comedian Katy Brand and follows Nancy Stokes (Emma), a retired schoolteacher, who is yearning for some adventure, and some sex. She has a plan which involves hiring a young sex worker named Leo Grande (Tipperary actor Daryl McCormack). You might recognise Daryl from Fair City or the last two seasons of Peaky Blinders and together with Emma, is brilliant in this.
At the heart of the film is a woman in middle age on a journey of discovery about herself, her body, sex and relationships. And it’s mind-blowing that a 63-year-old star like Emma is naked on screen for the first time.
In an interview with The Times to publicise the film, Emma spoke of being type-cast based on appearance. “I’ve never really been offered sex scenes. As my mother said, I’ve basically played a series of ‘good’ women. I do ‘cerebral’, and I have also never conformed to the shape or look of someone they might want to see naked. By ‘they,’ I mean male executives. I’m too mouthy, not pretty enough, not the right kind of body. And, crikey, you are constantly told what kind of body you have.”
Emma has been on the publicity trail for the film and over the course of it has spoken a lot about her relationship with her body. At Sundance Film Festival she revealed that she, Daryl and director Sophie Hyde took an unusual approach to rehearsals. “Sophie, Daryl, and I rehearsed entirely nude and talked about our bodies, talked about our relationship with our bodies, drew them, discussed the things that we find difficult about them, things we like about them, described one another’s bodies.”
In another interview she described her relationship with her body in her younger years as “fucked up”. She said that she “'lost confidence in my body in my early teens. I was surrounded by iconography that suggested to me, very forcibly, carving messages in my brain that have never been removed, that I could never have a nice enough body. That I'd never be thin or pretty enough. I felt that my shape, and everything, was wrong. I was saddled with that [thought process] from very early on, as were most of my friends.”
She said she has regrets about that time, that she wasn’t able to tune out the noise around the perfect body. “It's a great, great shame. It's a waste of time, energy, money, passion, and purpose. When I think of the waste, I wish that I had found a way to escape from that earlier. I now know that I never will. I'll die with it, and that's that.”
Like many of us, standing naked, looking at ourselves, has never been one of Emma’s favourite things to do and being naked and observing herself onset was incredibly hard. “If I stand in front of a mirror, I’m always sort of pulling something, or I’ll turn to the side, I’ll do something. I can’t just stand there. Why would I do that, it’s horrifying,” she said. “But that’s the problem, isn’t it, that women have been brainwashed all our lives to hate our bodies. That’s just the fact. And everything that surrounds us reminds us how imperfect we are, and everything is wrong with us,” she said at Berlinale.
“I think women's pleasure has never been at the top of anyone's agenda," she later told People magazine. "Whilst I've never really accepted my own body as anything to write home about, and I've always thought it was not much, not really at all, attractive, nonetheless, I have lived in it and experienced pleasure in it. I think the more we can accept our bodies — and not love them, you don't have to love them — but you do have to accept them in order to experience anything inside them."
A conversation around women’s pleasure, especially women in their 50s and 60s, shouldn’t be revolutionary but it is. Seeing a 55-year-old female character, naked on screen, exploring her sexuality, shouldn’t be revolutionary but it bloody well is. Emma’s openness both about her own body and her character’s experiences is wonderful. As we’re all talking more and more about menopause and a sexual life after it, seeing women like Emma up there on the screen is so empowering and necessary. The story that it’s all over when you hit 50 has been told for far too long.
Some of that comes down to culture. In the UK, Ireland and the US – youth, thinness and a standard attractiveness are valued more than anything else.
I have just returned from Italy where women of every age and size were enjoying the beach with friends and family in thong bikinis, very obviously not giving two hoots about an extra tummy roll. They were sexy and seemed free in a way I’m not sure I could ever be.
Men were grabbing them, looking at them, loving them and it was amazing. They are empowered by their age and experience and appreciated by their lovers for both. I’m not saying that Italy is perfect or that no Italian woman feels the pressure of aging, but they’re coming at it from a very different starting point. We need more women in their 50s having sex on screen and we need to be a bit more Italian in our attitude to our bodies.
Of course, there is nuance to every conversation and as the trailer for the new film version of Matilda was released this week, Emma’s celebration of accepting our bodies was questioned. In Matilda, Emma plays Miss Trunchbull and can be seen in the trailer wearing a fat suit. When in 2022 is a fat suit necessary? Many have argued already that there are many brilliant actresses living in a bigger body that could have played the part, which is of course true, but I think there’s an even more important argument to make. Why do the baddies, the evil ones, the nasty characters have to be ugly or fat or childless? We know that’s not true in life. Horrible people come in all shapes and sizes and can often be thin, blonde, stunning.
Male villains can be absolute rides and there’s rarely mention of whether they are fathers or not. We need to stop creating female ones based on their appearance and equating badness with a physical characteristic.
Jennifer Stevens, July 2022
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