Good Luck to You, Leo Grande rewrites onscreen nudity

It culminates with a full-frontal nude scene which has been called “brave”. But that’s not what it is.

After almost two hours of playful exploration, and honest and emotional confrontations about sexual desire and female pleasure, there’s a pivotal scene right at the end of Good Luck to You, Leo Grande.

It’s a scene that isn’t a spoiler as such. While it is a culmination of the film, Good Luck to You, Leo Grande is a movie that is very much about the journey and not the destination.

In this scene, Emma Thompson’s character Nancy stares at her entirely nude body in a full-length mirror. She considers it for an extended moment and she looks content.

Her appraisal of her body isn’t because she “likes” what she sees, it’s about so much more than that.

“I realised I was playing someone who was seeing herself for the first time and unlocked by Leo. She’s able to look at herself with what I would describe as a neutral gaze,” Thompson said during a Q&A session for Good Luck to You, Leo Grande.

“She’s not going, ‘Oh, wow, I really love myself now’. That’s not the journey. That’s romance, that’s Hollywood.”

Good Luck to You, Leo Grande treats onscreen nudity very differently.

Good Luck to You, Leo Grande is Hollywood, but not in the conventional sense of perfect bodies and uncomplicated happy endings. The story about a widow who hires a sex worker to help her discover pleasure, the film is a nuanced, thoughtful and compassionate depiction of the complexities of female sexuality and desire.

And that scene at the end is in many ways an embodiment of its ethos. It’s a declaration that bodies are not purely for visual judgment, but functional in so many ways.

The pose Thompson chooses for her character – inspired by medieval paintings of Adam and Eve – informs her character’s acceptance of not how she looks but who she is allowed to be.

“I wanted to stand [that way] because it’s very relaxed and we don’t stand in front of the mirror in a relaxed way because obviously we’ve all been objectified and objectify ourselves in the most unpleasant, cruel and unnecessary ways,” Thompson explained.

“So, how can she look at herself? I took myself back and gave her a moment of absolute authenticity. You see her hand go down and you can see that she’s still, stimulated and her whole body is alive. It’s the first time she’s ever been inside her body. She’s never looked at it like that.

“God willing that we will all have the opportunity to do that in our lives.”

The film is a two-hander between Emma Thompson and Daryl McCormack.

The choice to have a scene in which a female actor, 63, bares all has been called many things but the word that seems to be coming up a lot in the discourse is “brave”.

“Brave” is a word that comes with a lot of baggage.

“The word brave in that instance implies that she should be ashamed of her body or that there’s something to overcome, to be brave about,” director Sophie Hyde told news.com.au.

“We don’t say that about somebody who has what we call the ideal body. What Emma has is an untreated body on screen. We’re just so used to seeing something else.

“I don’t want to say she wasn’t brave because we know that in our culture it’s still ‘brave’ to do that.

“It’s a very raw moment and it’s layered with a lot of feeling. It does draw attention. The reception now is better than it would’ve been a few years ago.”

There’s a lot about Good Luck to You, Leo Grande that could be considered “brave” if you set aside how loaded the word is. It features several sex scenes between Thompson’s character and Leo, played by Daryl McCormack, and there’s a lot of nudity.

But it’s never smutty. Instead, it’s sensual and erotic. Its explicit encounters are rooted in consent and it never exploits the body purely for visual titillation – there’s always a character reason for every lingered frame.

Thompson said she had every confidence that Hyde would handle the intimate scenes with “compassion, discretion and taste”. And perhaps that’s why the film is very not Hollywood.

Sophie Hyde with Emma Thompson and Daryl McCormack.

For Hyde, those raw depictions of Thompson and McCormack’s bodies also go to the heart of how we consider our bodies, not just onscreen but in our off-screen lives.

She said, “With Nancy, I saw a character who had never really questioned much about her life or her opinions, and she had settled into what she was, what was expected of her. And she re-spouted what was expected of her when it comes to being a religious education teacher and retelling that curriculum over and over without question.

“It’s dangerous when we’re like that. But it’s quite exciting because she’s made this decision at the beginning of the film to do something that really challenges who she is, and that is going to challenge her as a human.

“She accepts throughout the film, a series of provocations and challenges from Leo that unlock something for her.

“Underneath all of that is this thing we’ve done to women, maybe to all people but particularly to those of us that have been raised as women, which is this shame about our bodies. That they are never good enough and that our bodies are never going to live up to an ideal.

“That the most important thing about our bodies is how they look to someone else.

“How much more shameful could we get than saying that this thing that keeps us alive and gives us pleasure and does all these things for you, the most important thing is how it looks. We say that to everyone – we say it to our kids and we say it to everyone around us and to ourselves.

“What a bloody waste of time and energy. That shame then leads into sexual shame. We are soaked in it, in a culture that tells us that. So we have to really try and stand outside of it.

“Em [Thompson] likes to say it doesn’t necessarily mean self-love. It’s not looking at your body and going, ‘I love the way it looks’. It’s saying the way it looks isn’t the most important thing about it.”

Good Luck to You, Leo Grande is in cinemas now