This film is most emphatically adults-only.
(In fact, you kids shouldn’t even read this review. Check out my comments about Lightyear instead.)
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| Getting Nancy (Emma Thompson) into bed requires considerable patience and gentle persuasion by sex worker Leo (Daryl McCormack). But, once there, will she succumb to the moment? |
I was surprised to learn that Leo Grande didn’t originate as a play, as it would have been perfect on a minimal stage. Regardless, this intimate 97-minute drama never is boring; stars Emma Thompson and Daryl McCormack make the most of Brand’s thoughtful, tender, sweetly sensitive and frequently amusing dialogue.
The premise is simple: Retired teacher and recent widow Nancy Stokes (Thompson), attempting to compensate for a sexually dull marriage, arranges a hotel room session with sex worker Leo (McCormack). She thinks she wants to experience the sort of all-stops-out libidinous pleasure that her husband never deigned to provide.
But when Nancy answers the soft knock and allows Leo into the room … well, best intentions and a lifetime of fantasies aren’t nearly the same as being confronted by this attractive, well-muscled and instinctively sensitive stranger.
What follows is thoroughly charming … and, as time passes, increasingly verbally explicit.
Thompson excels at poor Nancy’s initial blend of shyness, flustered embarrassment and second thoughts. (Heck, third, fourth and fifth thoughts!) Thompson plays it perfectly, her wary, closed-off body language matched by Nancy’s nervous non-sequiturs and an absolutely inability to look Leo directly in the eye.
Her stream-of-consciousness comments often are funny: gently amusing at the very least, and possibly hilarious (depending upon the sexual awareness of the individual viewer). Much of what Nancy eventually reveals likely will sound and feel familiar to many women; Brand clearly knows her way around the (often unfulfilled) female sexual experience.
As a means of keeping her barriers up, Nancy also wants to know more about Leo as a person … which is to say, what his life is like when he isn’t, um, on call. Leo adeptly deflects such inquiries, always with a warm smile; such inquiries would destroy what is, in effect, role play with rigid, unspoken rules.
