More often than not, on-screen representations of sex and female pleasure are far too unrealistic. While it is important for writers to exercise their creative freedom, having to sit through totally unrelatable depictions of sex in media can get tiring.
With the rise of the sex-positive movement in recent times, there has been a need for movies that teach women to embody their sex and sexualities, while offering more realistic portrayals of women’s sexual desires and fulfillments. Good luck to you, Leo Grande seems to be exactly what we needed.
Written by Katy Brand and directed by Sophie Hyde, the movie focuses on retired British school teacher and widow, Nancy Stokes (Emma Thompson), who wishes to experience sexual pleasure such as she had never known in her thirty-one years of marriage, and hires a sex worker in person of Leo Grande (Darryl McCormack) to help her do just that. Leo is young, black, confident, sexy and smart—using words like reductive, ambivalent and empirically sexy. Pragmatic, nervous and sexually repressed, Nancy constantly switches between wanting to call the whole thing off and just “getting it over with.”
Nancy’s experience with sex has been one of shame and disappointment, made worse by the fact that her sex life with her husband was constrained by a lack of intimacy, his unwillingness to communicate or deviate from pattern and her failure to assert her sexual needs. What she wants now, even though she’s afraid to take it, is a taste of the intimacy she never got while married to her husband. In most parts of the world, and in Africa especially, sex and sexuality in have been mostly a male-privileging phenomenon both in precolonial and colonial times.
Women on other continents are starting to have greater control over their own sexual desires as a result of the globalisation storm, and more African women need to catch up. Regardless of the taboos engrained in cultures associated with sexual matters and the parameters of sexual appropriateness set by most African cultures, as most places, sexuality in Africa should take a new turn in the post-colonial patchwork as previously unspoken and forbidden sexual attitudes and acts should pop up in the continent’s socio-culture.
A two-hander, the movie makes up for its lack of characters and location with riveting dialogue. Every line reveals something about the characters’ backstory, giving an insight into their thoughts and actions while also allowing for a buildup of intimacy between both characters.
The topic of sex is explored from various angles; the expectations around who should have and/or want it, the stigma surrounding sex work, the relationship between body positivity and sexual fulfillment and the restrictions placed on female sexuality.
It is a marvel how real this story is, depicting the experience of female aging that is so rarely represented on screen and all the while serving the audience moments of laughter and tears. Writer Katy Brand does a terrific job of portraying the issues of sexual repression and the importance of sexual fulfillment, infusing just the right amount of humor so the conversation doesn’t get stuffy.
The generational gap between the two characters allows for two very different outlooks on sex and such honest conversation that would otherwise be considered taboo, such as when Nancy admits to being disappointed by her children and wishing she’d never become a mother in the first place.
Good Luck to You, Leo Grande is a demonstration of all the ways sex can be humourous, exciting, positive and realistic. It teaches women to be proud of their bodies, desires and sexualities, while embodying and fully appreciating their femininity.
