What do you do when the callboy knocks? So when things get serious, when the digital preparations are complete – choosing and booking the man and the hotel room. So what if there really is a stranger standing in front of the room door with whom you will exchange intimacies in exchange for money, at least if everything goes according to plan?
Nancy Stokes is understandably excited. She has dressed up with a blouse, pencil skirt and eyeshadow. Chic, but a little bit stuffy. She strokes and tugs and looks at what promises relaxation in the minibar. She immediately puts the sparkling wine back, and a smaller clear one is on the short list.
Emma Thompson is celebrated in many reviews for her courage, which she certainly needed for this role. She can be seen naked, she addresses the difficult relationship many women have to their bodies. Thompson plays Nancy, her real name is different. She has adopted a pseudonym for this unusual date. She has been a widow for two years, she is retired, was a religion teacher. And because Emma Thompson is a beautiful woman and in every role she is likeable, clever and kindly witty, one is initially open to the premise of this film.
So she booked Leo Grande, played by Daryl McCormack (“Peaky Blinders”). A handsome, muscular young man who is supposed to give her what life has so far denied her – fulfilling sex. Gladly with an orgasm at the end, but she doesn’t expect that, it won’t work anyway, so he doesn’t need to put any unnecessary pressure on himself. This is roughly how Nancy talks to Leo, several times she wants to end the whole thing before it is completed because she is unsure: is she too old for him, too ugly, is he really doing it voluntarily, or is he, even if he doesn’t look like it, in? his expensive, modern clothes, a victim of human trafficking?
Nancy’s doubts, desires, and reflections essentially encompass the entire contemporary discourse on sex work and its moral positioning between crime, abuse, wellness, and therapy. “Should sex work be legal?” was an essay topic Nancy had her students work on each year, with a monotonously boring result: yes, because it protects sex workers, but “the moral issue remains unresolved.”
It’s just that the more Leo reassures his client Nancy with assurances that he finds something lovable in everyone in his job that allows him to enjoy working, the more he finds himself on the therapeutic end of the prostitution spectrum located, the more skeptical one becomes when watching. “The world would be much more peaceful if everyone could book someone,” he says, for example. “The government should pay you,” Nancy replies.
An aging man who books a young woman – would you like him too?
Because if you turn the constellation around for just a moment, it gets weird. If this weren’t for female pleasure and menopausal body positivity, but for an aging man to tearfully confess to a beautiful young, and yes, maybe dark-skinned, sex worker that he’s been wishing for oral sex his whole life, to no avail. Would you feel the same pang of sympathy that you felt for Emma Thompson, who almost ended up an old maid in Ang Lee’s Sense and Sensibility? It’s Emma Thompson, she didn’t deserve that.
Despite all the humor and some sensitivity that director Sophie Hyde and the two great actors exercise in this chamber play, you can’t avoid the impression that this film makes things a little too easy for itself, despite all the almost annoying squabbles of Nancy. Why does she have to explore her sexuality with a young man when, as she says, there are people her age who are interested? What about the issues of skin color, age, privileges that have a decisive influence on power dynamics?
What finally saves “My hours with Leo” is the narrative turn that this chamber play takes on the third meeting. Nancy, out of sheer lust-empowerment and misunderstood closeness, becomes the encroaching religion teacher that is also in her. She transcends all the boundaries that Leo Grande – of course he’s not really called that – has set up for his professional self. Only the remorse about it brings them to true self-knowledge. And the film to a forgiving, one might almost say: satisfying end.
Good luck to you, Leo Grande, UK 2022 – directed by Sophie Hyde. Book: Katy Brand. Starring: Emma Thompson, Daryl McCormack, Wild Bunch, 97 minutes. Theatrical release: 07/14/2022