Peter Viney's Blog

Directed by Sophie Hyde
Written by Katy Brand

CAST

Emma Thompson  – Nancy Stokes
Daryl McCormack – Leo Grande|
Isabella Laughland- Becky

What a strange film. It’s basically a two person story set in one hotel room, like a filmed stage play with mainly just talking rather than action,  except there are some bits you probably couldn’t show on stage. There are bits in another sense you probably wouldn’t want to see.

What puzzles me is the number of people involved on IMDB. This is just sound and camera:

That’s thirty-one. Add three sub-directors. sixteen art department. Eleven editorial. Two costume. Four make-up. Two SFX. Thirty-eight ‘additional crew.’ Two transport. Five script and continuity. Four music. I understand how important credits are in the industry.

It’s convenient to use a built hotel room set, not an actual room for camera angles and space, but I’d have thought two digital cameras could have done the whole thing, even just one if you wanted to spend a little more time on reverse shots. Given the space, I’d have assumed single camera work and reverses rather than multiple cameras anyway.  It looks as if the crew of less than twenty we used for ELT videos would have been excessive.

Emma Thompson is Nancy Stokes, a widowed and retired school RE teacher who decides to employ a young male sex worker, Leo Grande (Daryl McCormack). Both are lying about their names.  She is astonished that he knows long words. She has never had an orgasm or more than missionary position sex, and wants to find out what it’s like before she fades away.

He is some kind of calm angel who will provide anything she wants. She quizzes him on his other clients. One is eighty-two, another is crippled and does it in a bath, while others are male. He can apparently perform with all of them anytime. She invades his privacy by asking too much about himself.

There is an astonishing amount of description on IMDB from all involved. I’ve never seen as much rationalising.

Emma Thompson: 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 is brave but also deeply flawed. So many of her beliefs are the opposite of woke which I love because that’s sort of 90% of the population. It’s not uncommon — her attitudes, her prejudices, her biases. She is just a wonderfully normal person who initiates this very strangely intimate, 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 successful, healthy children. She had a long career in religious education. Yet slowly, you see how this construction that looks so perfect is in fact far from it; that it contains an emptiness that has prevented her from really being fully a human being. We’re so conditioned. A lot of our societal constructions make it impossible for us to be present and I 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? Seeing Nancy go from being so tense that she can’t even cope with being touched, like that, to having a kind of a very beautiful attachment with this man, a deep and unromantic intimacy I’d never seen before.
IMDB

The best scene is the fourth part in the empty, bland, bare hotel coffee shop, where the waitress, Becky, turns out to be a pupil who she had once accused of being a ‘slut.’ Becky’s reaction expressions are the high point in the film.

Reviews say it’s empowering for women and life-affirming. Emma Thompson is praised for revealing all at her age, and shouting out for older women. It’s got four BAFTA nominations. Excellent reviews. The acting is very fine indeed.

OK. True. Otherwise, we really disliked it. We found it dull, seedy and totally asexual. The point is that it’s all mechanistic and unemotional. If I want to see mechanistic I’d prefer Jane Fonda and the robot in Barbarella. But then I’ve fallen into the male trap of judging on Jane Fonda’s young body then against Emma Thompson’s older one now. My bad, totally against the point, and what it’s about. Sorry. But I wouldn’t want to see it again.