Post by Dracula on Sept 24, 2022 18:51:20 GMT -5
Good Luck to You, Leo Grande(9/6/2022)
I’m catching up with this movie a few months after its initial release, and because of that I’m watching it after George Miller’s Three Thousand Years of Longing, which is interestingly also a movie that is somewhat built around a series of conversations between a man and a woman of a certain age in a hotel room. Of course that movie was filled with special effects filled flashbacks and goes somewhere else but this one is pretty much a pure conversation piece along the lines of My Dinner with Andre… except with (mostly offscreen) sex scenes. It appears to be an original screenplay but if you had told me it was based on a play I would have believed it. The film concerns a widow in her sixties played by Emma Thompson who has hired a male prostitute played by Daryl McCormack because she has generally lived a life of sexual repression and wants to explore sexual behaviors her husband was never interested in. But once the gigolo arrives her confidence waivers and she starts initiating conversations with “Leo Grande,” in which we come to learn a bit about the two of them, albeit in a very guarded way where we’re never quite sure how honest they’re being with each other. I don’t want to give away too much of where the film goes but it does do almost everything it needs to do with the set-up; both of its characters are interesting people with inner lives and off screen backstories and many of their conversations are just generally engaging in and of themselves. The film has a mature outlook on aging, sex, and generational differences; it’s kind of a shame that business nonsense has sent this Searchlight Pictures release went straight to Hulu because it would have been exactly the kind of indie counter-programing we were wishing we had last summer.
**** out of Five
I’m catching up with this movie a few months after its initial release, and because of that I’m watching it after George Miller’s Three Thousand Years of Longing, which is interestingly also a movie that is somewhat built around a series of conversations between a man and a woman of a certain age in a hotel room. Of course that movie was filled with special effects filled flashbacks and goes somewhere else but this one is pretty much a pure conversation piece along the lines of My Dinner with Andre… except with (mostly offscreen) sex scenes. It appears to be an original screenplay but if you had told me it was based on a play I would have believed it. The film concerns a widow in her sixties played by Emma Thompson who has hired a male prostitute played by Daryl McCormack because she has generally lived a life of sexual repression and wants to explore sexual behaviors her husband was never interested in. But once the gigolo arrives her confidence waivers and she starts initiating conversations with “Leo Grande,” in which we come to learn a bit about the two of them, albeit in a very guarded way where we’re never quite sure how honest they’re being with each other. I don’t want to give away too much of where the film goes but it does do almost everything it needs to do with the set-up; both of its characters are interesting people with inner lives and off screen backstories and many of their conversations are just generally engaging in and of themselves. The film has a mature outlook on aging, sex, and generational differences; it’s kind of a shame that business nonsense has sent this Searchlight Pictures release went straight to Hulu because it would have been exactly the kind of indie counter-programing we were wishing we had last summer.
**** out of Five
