Nudity in screenplay written for Thompson in mind was ‘hugely difficult’

Emma Thompson, a stand-up comedian her youth, manages to instil a sense of humour into her roles just by her way of speaking.

Emma Thompson and Daryl McCormack appear in Good Luck to You.

Emma Thompson, a stand-up comedian in her youth, manages to instil a sense of humour into her roles just by her way of speaking. In the British comedy, Good Luck to You, Leo Grande, directed by Australia’s Sophie Hyde (Animals, 52 Tuesdays), the multiple Oscar winner manages to broach serious issues of female sexuality while remaining very funny.

The film follows Thompson’s widow and retired schoolteacher, Nancy Stokes, who has never had an orgasm. She hires a sex worker who calls himself Leo Grande (played by handsome mixed race Irish actor Daryl McCormick who could be headed for the fame of Bridgerton’s Rege-Jean Page) to explore her sexuality. Thompson was immediately impressed when comedian and writer Katy Brand, whose credits include Nanny McPhee where Thompson played the title role, sent her the screenplay after writing it with her in mind.

“The situation is so unique; I’d never seen anything like it and I’d never seen a character like

Nancy,” admits Thompson, who has been happily married to actor Greg Wise since 2003 and was previously married to Kenneth Branagh. “What Nancy is doing is very courageous because it’s contrary to everything she is been brought up with and indeed to her own moral structure. She’s really breaking out of something and I found that completely

irresistible.”

In her own inimitable fashion Thompson goes on to talk about orgasms. “I don’t think that Nancy is an unusual figure even in modern life. If you don’t know how, and no one’s taught you, no one’s said that this is a thing, even though Cosmopolitan had the word orgasm splashed all over it for decades.

“When I was growing up, there was something very violent and sort of aggressive about it. If you have an orgasm was somehow uncool or just pathetic. We just don’t have orgasms in the same way as men, we don’t have a thing outside that you can work on. It’s just a sort of slightly simpler arrangement. Ours are much more subtle and

delicate.”

While she refers to the film as “a huge two-hander where people talk a lot” there was a great deal to learn regarding filming the sex and sexuality and dealing with the nudity and she willingly put herself in Hyde’s hands.

“Sophie, Daryl and I rehearsed entirely nude, which was amazing,” she recalls. “We talked about our bodies, about our relationship with our bodies, drew them and discussed the things that we find difficult, what we like about them and described one another’s bodies. So it started with that kind of intensity and obviously had to continue in that way

until we finished. It was a very pure acting experience.”

Hyde greatly enjoyed their unusual methodology. “We felt like we walked on to the set, ready, like we knew what we wanted to make and what we wanted to say and they continued to work at night right through that process,” she recalls.

In the film’s final scene Nancy stands naked looking at herself in a floor-length mirror. “It’s very challenging to be nude at 62,” Thompson admits.

“This woman does something very extraordinary. She stands in front of a mirror alone, and she drops her robe, and she stands completely relaxed in front of the mirror, looking at her body, not with approval, but with no particular judgment.

“I realised it was something that I had to act because I’d never done that, I’d never stood in front of a mirror without judging. That’s an interesting thing, to sort of experiment with yourself, but it was hugely, hugely difficult. I don’t think I could have done it before the age that I am. And yet, of course, the age that I am makes it extremely challenging because we aren’t used to seeing untreated bodies on the screen. We are used to seeing bodies that have been worked on, you know, for a long time to

make them acceptable to our eyes. And it’s time that we did more to change that.”

The film, which has been picked up by Searchlight Pictures in the US for about US$7.5 million, will release here via The Reset Collective, a newly created Australian company partners with one of the film’s producers Genisius Pictures. The film will soon screen at the Berlin Film Festival as will another Sundance entry, Call Jane, a drama about the Jane collective of trailblazing illegal abortionists in the 1960s.

Sigourney Weaver is a standout in the latter film playing the determined ringleader. We watch as Elizabeth Banks’ well-to-do wife and mother becomes involved, eventually performing abortions. HBO’s The Janes followed in the US documentary competition and to see the real women then and now proved far more illuminating. The women naturally express their concern at the 1973 Roe v. Wade Supreme Court ruling that made abortions legal in the US -and was propelled by the Janes – now potentially being overturned in June.

One of the surprises was to meet the rough-around-the-edges labourer who originally

performed abortions with surprising care before he had to stop because of his links to the Mob. The Janes themselves then took over until their arrest and they were eventually exonerated.

Generally in Sundance the documentaries were of a high standard and two of the best, Ed Perkins’ The Princess and Amy Poehler’s Lucy and Desi, focus on famous women. We might think we’ve seen enough of Diana, Princess of Wales, in The Crown and Spencer, but HBO’s The Princess follows her life by relying purely on footage of the world’s most famous woman and of those around her and those commenting on her, and thereby makes a statement about the intense media coverage driven by the public’s desire to be close to her.

“The bit of the story that I didn’t really feel has been explored is, what does Diana’s story say about all of us?” notes Perkins, a Brit, just 11 at the time of her death. “We felt that this archive-only form might hopefully allow us to turn the camera back on to all of us, and in doing so, hopefully look at some bigger and perhaps more difficult questions about our role in all of this. What is our relationship to monarchy? What is our relationship to celebrity? What is our potential complicity in this tragic tale?”

A still from Amy Poehler’s documentary Lucy and Desi.

Likewise Lucille Ball’s relationship with her husband Desi Arnaz has been widely examined, not only in Aaron Sorkin’s Prime Video series, Being the Ricardos, starring Nicole Kidman and Javier Bardem, but in a previous 1993 Emmy-award winning documentary Lucy and Desi: A Home Movie made by their daughter Lucie Arnaz Luckinbill, who was an executive producer on Sorkin’s series. Luckinbill had been reluctant to become involved in Lucy and Desi (also Prime Video) but was impressed by Amy Poehler’s presence and that Ron Howard’s company Imagine would produce.

Funnywoman Poehler, who starred in the series Parks and Recreation and is known for her Sarah Palin and Hillary Clinton parodies on Saturday Night Live, had previously directed two dramatic features, but Lucy and Desi would be her first documentary. She interviews her friends and mentors Carol Burnett and Bette Midler who in turn had been mentored by Ball.

“I adamantly only wanted people who had met Lucy and Desi, because I thought even if just

briefly, it was important that their worlds overlapped,” says Poehler. “I think that Carol Burnett and Bette Midler are living examples of what mentorship looked like.”

Burnett commends Ball for being fearless in her comedy as well as for being physical, something Ball had learnt from one of her own mentors, Buster Keaton. Midler commends Ball for being someone who was “so beautiful, but she wasn’t afraid to look ugly and that was something we’d never seen a woman do.”

Poehler’s greatest asset though were 20 audiotapes recorded by Ball and Arnaz, sometimes just daily thoughts that even Luckinbill hadn’t heard. The movie examines both of her parents in full measure including their difficult early lives while omitting Desi’s philandering and only touching on his alcoholism. Though it shows his drinking as a way of dealing with the pressures of running their Desilu Studios, where he not only produced I Love Lucy and The Lucy Show, but other ground breaking shows, The Untouchables, Mission: Impossible and Star Trek, while numerous major shows like The Dick Van Dyke Show and Hogan’s

Heroes were filmed on the lot.

As a Cuban immigrant Arnaz pushed himself to the extreme and he had little time for his wife. After they divorced they both went on to have longer second marriages while remaining friends and collaborators. The film ends with a tear-inducing scene as Luckinbill explains the final emotional words they said to each other just before Arnaz’s death. Ball was the final person to speak to him apart from their daughter.

Another strong film, screening in the documentary competition, was Kathryn Ferguson’s Nothing Compares, about Irish singer Sinead O’Connor, who openly discusses her abusive childhood with an unstable parent and Ireland’s complicated relationship with the Catholic Church. Given the recent suicide of O’Connor’s son, neither woman promoted the film. Regina King, whose son and only child also recently ended his own life – he cited mental health fears just before his death – was likewise unavailable. King had two films in the program, the well-received female-driven horror film Master, and the less inviting darkly comic Honk for Jesus, Save Your Soul, where she plays the first lady of a prominent Southern Baptist mega-church alongside Stirling K. Brown (This is Us) as her disgraced

preacher husband.

Interestingly mental health issues fed into the Sundance documentary Jeen-juhs: A Kanye Trilogy which follows Kanye West’s rise to fame. As it happens the billionaire rapper and entrepreneur, who now goes by the moniker of Ye, is bipolar and the film’s director Clarence “Coodie” Simmons, Ye’s longtime friend, even stops filming during one of Ye’s diatribes. The series, which does not include his relationship with Kim Kardashian apart from a few red carpet moments, dwells more on his relationship with his supportive mother and his friends. Simmons’s film, which he co-directed with another Ye buddy and music videomaker Chike Ozah, rather than including talking heads interviews, consist of footage culled from 330 hours of video shot over 20 years and is raw evidence of the rapper’s relentless drive to succeed. Netflix relentlessly pursued the film too, forking out $US30 million for the series which screens from February 16.

Girls creator and star, Lena Dunham, 35, makes her first feature film in more than a decade with Sharp Stick, which refers to the softening term doctors told her as they injected her with needles. Dunham, who had a hysterectomy when she was 31, says it is her most personal project to date.

Lena Dunham.

The film stars talented newcomer Kristine Froseth as 26-year-old Sarah Jo, who had a hysterectomy at age 15 and is determined to lose her virginity. She manages to do so with her employer, played by Jon Bernthal, and once that dalliance ends she aims to have the sexual experiences she has missed out on with other men, including a porn actor.

How did Dunham come up with the idea? “At the time I was watching films and asking a lot of questions about how we depict female sexuality on screen and how it’s often so inextricably linked to trauma,” she explains. “I’ve seen that with some of the trauma in my life, some of it being medical trauma, and wondered what it would be like to have a character who had been formed by this medical trauma. That really created the naive and

very specific worldview in Sarah Jo, and then what it’s like when she meets someone who challenges that and cracks it open.”

While the film met with middling reviews, that was not the case with Living directed by Oliver Hermanus and starring an exceptional Bill Nighy as a buttoned-up 1950s’ public servant who is determined to make something of his life after receiving a terminal cancer diagnosis. A remake of Akira Kurosawa’s 1952 film Ikiru relocated to London, the film boasts a screenplay by Kazuo Ishiguro (The Remains of the Day) and should not be missed when it releases here later in the year.

WINNERS

The Sundance winners this year were only announced on Twitter. Not that the ceremony is

usually a particularly glamorous event but there is some fun to be had while savouring some of Francis Ford Coppola’s wines and watching the awards presentation live on stage. Still, winners are winners and while the non-competitive Premieres section is where the commercial films screen, there are at least a number of the prizewinners that will do well in Australian cinemas.

A strong indicator of this are the films that won audience awards, especially Canadian director Daniel Roher’s secretly filmed Navalny, about the popular Russian opposition leader and presidential candidate, Alexei Navalny, who survived an assassination attempt by poisoning and during his recovery makes some shocking discoveries. Truly striking a chord, the film, which unspools as a consummate spy thriller, took out both the overall audience award and the audience award in the U.S. Documentary Competition.

The audience award in the US Dramatic Competition went to Cha Cha Real Smooth, one of

two films at the festival produced by 32 year-old Dakota Johnson. In the film, picked up during the festival for about $US15 million by Apple TV Plus, Johnson plays an older woman with whom her 22-year-old babysitter (played by the film’s director Cooper Raiff) becomes infatuated. The chemistry between the pair is palpable. Johnson’s second film Am I Ok? is less appealing, even if she again shows her dramatic chops in her portrayal of a woman who realises she is a lesbian.

The winners of the top Grand Jury prizes came as a surprise with writer-director Goran Stolevski’s well-reviewed Australian horror film, You Won’t Be Alone, missing out. The poetic and sometimes gory film, which is set in a 19th century Macedonian village, follows a young witch who inhabits the bodies of others, including Noomi Rapace’s abused

wife., though the film is ultimately a comment on the humanity she has failed to experience.

“I thought the premise would be in the horror context, but after that I just wanted to treat it as I would any other relationship drama about people with thoughts and feelings and yearnings,” the Madedonia-born Stolevski said after the screening, via Zoom from Australia.

Instead, Utama, about an elderly Quechua couple from the Bolivian highlands struggling with an uncommon and lengthy drought, won in the World Cinema Dramatic section, while the poetic Delhi-set environmental film All That Breathes, about two brothers devoted to saving black kite birds, took out the World Cinema Documentary prize.

Nikyatu Jusu’s Nanny, about an undocumented nanny (Anna Diop) experiencing a violent

supernatural presence in New York as she awaits the arrival of her son from Senegal, won in the US Dramatic category. The Exiles, which follows documentarian Christine Choy as she tracks down three exiled dissidents from the Tiananmen Square massacre, took out the best US Documentary award – even if The Janes, which was far better researched and made, should have won. See the rest of the winners at sundance.org.