Good Luck To You Leo Grande:
This is an impossibly charming film about a 65-year lately widowed wife and mother who seeks the services of a very handsome young gigolo to give her an orgasm: in forty years of her marriage Nancy (Emma Thompson) has never experienced an orgasm. She wants the experience at least once. Now, if this sounds like a sex comedy, then it is not. Far from it. What the great Emma Thompson does to her character is to give it a life beyond the sheer physicality of the plot. To say Good Luck To You, Leo Grande is about a stuffy British woman and a rakish sex escort is way too frivolous.
This is a film that advocates stark honesty about sexual desires and needs: a privilege and luxury that is denied to women past 50 (not men, though) in most societies including the so-called liberal ones. Taken as a treatise on female sexuality past the age of consent, this is a very important piece of cinema, throbbing with delightfully forbidden dialogues on parental responsibility, sexual satisfaction and body-claiming (a sort of counterpoint to body-shaming) where the woman well past her prime, is given the right to love her own physical assets, no matter how out of shape. All this may seem like an invitation to a film leaden with sexual statements. Let me hasten to clarify, Good Luck To You Leo Grande is first and foremost, a very charming piece of cinema, almost like a Pretty Woman in reverse: imagine if Julia Roberts was the millionaire and Richard Gere the hooker, and imagine if Julia was 30 years older and Richard 20 years younger. The merger of two worlds: one elitist and sexually blanked out and the other streetwise and sexually vibrant and yet somehow innocent manipulative motives, is brilliantly balanced in the film.
No words can suffice to describe what Emma Thompson brings to her role. One wonders if even Meryl Streep could have brought to the film that sense of urgent sexual nullity that Emma Thompson does. And the sex worker, played by the Irish-American young actor Daryl McCormack, is just the right fit. Utterly charming, slightly mysterious and in no way a sad tragic sex worker, Leo is much more than what Nancy’s money can buy for a few hours.
Aftersun:
Scottish writer-director Charlotte Wells’ Aftersun is an exceptional exploration of a father-daughter relationship, as seen through the prism of adulthood. Deftly autobiographical, it is the director’s threshing, flailing attempt to understand her father and his unexpressed grief that she had sensed as a 11-year old when they went on a holiday together to Turkey. It was meant to be a fun holiday. And it was! But it underlined by a profound sense of melancholy. That holiday spent in a bustle of swimming and bantering, becomes the centrifugal thought in the theme of things. This is a lovely film, delicately drawing the daughter’s thoughts out of their memory-slumber to portray the father as a brave, generous, caring soul striven by his failure to be the kind of patriarchal provider who can fulfil his daughter’s every wish: hence the cheap vacation, hence the cutting of corner. Hence the constant nagging concern, the counting of pennies. And yet in spite of the elephant in the room, father Calum and daughter Sophie share a beautifully unstated bond of mutual love and understanding that spreads itself out over a week in the seaside resort.
Of course, it’s not all sweetness and kinship. The conversations between father and daughter sound energetic and unrehearsed even when biting and hurtful. The father and daughter share silences as much as conversations and the camera gives them room to do as they like. I don’t know how much of their conversations are improvised. I doubt there is any room for unrehearsed thoughts in this film about reclaiming a vital part of the past.
The compelling quietude that encircles the central relationship stays with you. It defines the film and its existence, and yet the father-daughter relationship is not seen through rose-tinted glasses. Set in the 1970s, the narrative opens its heart to what Sophie recalls through her constant video recording during the memorable, unforgettable yet gap-filled vacation with her father.
Compartment No.6 :
While doling out the theme of the comfort of the familiar when a character is placed in the discomfort of the unfamiliar, Compartment No 6 never ceases to venture into areas of human interaction that are padlocked and forbidden. There is an exquisite pain secreted at the heart of the relationship that grows between our heroine and the rude stranger. You will never know where that pain comes from, or goes. Director Juho Kuosmanen leaves the relationship in a zone of bewildering ambivalence. Not the kind where you don’t know if the two will be together finally, but a far deeper place where you are left wondering what binds these two strangers together: one gay the other straight, one hurt the other gone beyond feeling anything… Or is it just the opposite: Lyokha hurts so much it has ceased to manifest itself in his behaviour?
Questions riddles and the conundrum of the dynamics that define the man-woman relationship course through the veins of this vital and vigorous take on what it takes to “know” someone without probing for a common ground. Your favourite moment in the wonderful charming mischievous and pained film would be everyone’s favourite moment. It occurs just before the journey ends. Will we ever know why two strangers become so close they can hear each other’s heartbeats? I was baffled by the enigma that envelopes this tale of strangers who bond on a train. Their emotions are so tenebrous it’s like staring into a tunnel where the light is visible but barely. With the two main actors delivering performances so subtle shaded and muted, it is the opposite of bravura. Compartment No 9 will make you hanker for a journey inwards into yourself to ask that one question which haunts most of us all our lives. What makes life worth living?
