Old Yorker

  • Good Luck to You, Leo Grande

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Sophie Hyde (2022)

    I chickened out of Sophie Hyde’s sex dramedy at the cinema last year because of its star.  In her public statements and appearances Emma Thompson gives the impression of almost indecent self-confidence:  the prospect of watching her pretend to be someone desperately inhibited – and of an audience audibly lapping this up – was intimidating.  I caught up with Good Luck to You, Leo Grande in the privacy of BFI Player.

    Thompson’s character, Nancy Stokes, is about sixty – a mother of two, a widow, now retired from teaching religious studies in a secondary school.  Nancy Stokes isn’t her real name:  it’s the one she uses to book a hotel room for the afternoon, there to meet with a male sex worker half her age – Leo Grande (Daryl McCormack).  That turns out not to be his real name either but Leo is more comfortable with his line of work than Nancy is about paying for his services.  On this first meeting with him, she’s a whirlwind of tense dither; not much physical happens between them.  But Leo, contrastingly relaxed, is sympathetic to Nancy’s self-reproachful anxiety and encourages her to talk about herself.  She reveals she’s never had an orgasm in her life although she faked them throughout her thirty-one-year marriage.  She’s never had oral sex either; her late husband, the only sexual partner she ever had, considered that demeaning.  For his part, Leo tells Nancy that he finds his line of work often interesting, sometimes rewarding and not at all demeaning – despite this particular client’s seeming to think he should.  Leo does admit that he hasn’t told his mother what his job is:  she thinks he works on an oil rig.  That makes Nancy laugh, briefly but almost hysterically.

    She books another session with Leo in the same room, a week later.  Those last two phrases suggest a play text and Leo Grande often seems to belong in a theatre rather than on a cinema screen.  Until early in its last act, the piece is a two-hander; until an even later point, it’s nearly all talk.  Nancy’s fears of letting herself go are a pretext for that but the film’s lack of visual life, even within the limits of its nearly one-set location, is a problem.  (We first see Leo emerging from a café onto the street; there’s a longer sequence in the café of the hotel where he and Nancy meet; otherwise it’s all the booked room.)  This is the third feature from Australian film-maker Sophie Hyde; although she directs very capably Emma Thompson and Daryl McCormack (in his first lead role in cinema), Hyde frames the action unimaginatively.  There’s no sense of claustrophobia or security or anything else much in the hotel room.  Even its impersonality barely registers.

    This is a first screenplay by the British comedy writer and performer Katy Brand.  She shows a good ear for dialogue and supplies some funny, insightful moments but the script as a whole is unsatisfying.  Brand presumably wanted to explore a self-doubting, frustrated, late-middle-aged woman rather than a fit young man who makes his living selling sexual services; she obviously recognised that wasn’t enough material for a feature-length script.  The fundamental imbalance of her interest in the two characters always shows, though.  For the first half of the film, Leo is a virtual fantasy figure – handsome, courteous, sensitive, funny.  Later on, Brand tries to give him substance by revealing that he’s not only estranged from his brother but was disowned by his mother when he was fifteen (when she caught him and his friends engaging in group sex).  Between their second and third sessions, Nancy does some online research to discover Leo’s real name (Connor – but I’ll stick with Leo).  At the third session, after he has performed oral sex on her, she asks if they can be friends and offers to speak with his mother to bring about reconciliation.  These things express not credible facets of Nancy’s personality but Katy Brand’s sense of obligation to give Leo backstory – because that’s what you do in a two-character study.  Nancy’s inhibitions aren’t the only straitjacket at work here.

    Brand’s comedy writing is more anchored in character – Nancy’s character, that is – although some bits work better than others.  It’s amusing that congenitally well-organised Nancy arrives for the second session armed with a checklist of sexual experiments (which they are to her) to work through.  It’s a lame idea that attempts to get going on this agenda – item one, fellatio – are repeatedly thwarted by Nancy’s answering calls on her mobile from her crisis-prone daughter.  (She doesn’t much like either of her children:  she admits, guiltily but more than once, to finding her son boring.)

    Angered by Nancy’s intrusion in his personal life, Leo storms out of their third session and it’s surprising that he agrees to a fourth.  In the clumsy prelude to this, while Nancy waits for him in the deserted hotel café, the cast more than doubles:  Nancy is plagued by a trio of waitresses (Charlotte Ware, Carina Lopes, Isabella Laughland).  The last of these, Becky (Laughland), recognises Nancy as her former RE teacher, Mrs Robinson – a knowing nod to the gulf between this older woman and her namesake in The Graduate.  Once Leo arrives, Nancy starts explaining things to him at a rate of knots:  her real forename is Susan (I will use that from now on); he has awoken her sexually; she has recommended him to friends.  Becky chips in with a recollection of how Mrs Robinson once branded her and her schoolmates ‘sluts’ because of their short skirts.  Susan, after apologising for this, recommends Leo’s services to Becky, too.

    After more than an hour of discretion that verges on pussyfooting, Leo Grande bursts into a finale as candid as it’s energetic.  This is meant, of course, to reflect the transformation that Leo has wrought in Susan – and there are plenty of sex acts still to get through on her list in what both know will be their last session together.  Even so – and even though Sophie Hyde is Australian and Daryl McCormack Irish – the whiff of no-sex-please-we’re-British that hangs round most of the film makes its eventual, abrupt change of gear feel more like loss of control than liberation.  Given the set-up, it’s as inevitable that Susan will finally have her first orgasm as it was that Margaret in Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret. (2023) would get her first period.  The orgasm arrives as Susan pleasures herself watching Leo, as he searches for a sex toy, stroll nude around the room.  He then gets dressed, they shake hands and Susan speaks the farewell words that give the film its title.

    Daryl McCormack may not be a great actor (he was nothing special as the detective in the dreary mystery drama The Women in the Wall on television earlier this year) but he’s likeable and, within the limits of his role, very effective in Good Luck to You, Leo Grande.  Emma Thompson, when she expresses Nancy-Susan’s thoughts and feelings through her face and body, comes up with some of the best acting I’ve seen from her.  This culminates in the very last scene when, after Leo’s departure, Susan stands naked at a full-length mirror to appraise – and eventually approve of – her ageing body.  The idea is pat but Thompson’s nerve and the light in her eyes elevate the moment.  When she speaks (and she speaks a lot), she tends to be relatively artificial, although she shows some expert timing – and knows when to throw away Katy Brand’s more comically emphatic one-liners.

    5 December 2023

  • Fallen Leaves

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Kuolleet lehdet

    Aki Kaurismäki (2023)

    Ansa (Alma Pöysti), fortyish, lives alone in present-day Helsinki.  She has a zero-hour contract stacking supermarket shelves and chucking away food that’s past its sell-by date.  Holappa (Jussi Vatanen), also in his forties and unattached, does building work.  He’s an alcoholic who can’t hold down a job for long.  Ansa loses hers, too:  Fallen Leaves isn’t very old before she lets a derelict man have one expired product and takes another home to microwave.  The supermarket’s alarmingly vigilant security guard (Mikko Mykkänen) reports her.  Her boss (Martti Suosalo) deplores Ansa’s rule-breaking; the guard insists that ‘I was only doing my job’; she’s fired on the spot.

    The protagonists’ paths first cross in a bar, where Ansa goes with her friend, Liisa (Nuppu Koivu); Holappa has been dragged along there by Huotari (Janne Hyytiäinen), the closest he’s got to a friend.  It’s karaoke night – a chance for Huotari to perform and, he hopes, appeal to a woman.  While he’s failing to impress Liisa, Ansa and Holappa get talking and agree to see a film together.  After that first date, she invites him round for a meal and writes her address on a scrap of paper.  When he asks her name she says she’ll tell him next time they meet.  On his way home, Holappa, taking a packet of cigarettes from his pocket, inadvertently dislodges the scrap of paper, which blows away.  The following evening, Ansa, who has bought a second plate and extra cutlery for Holappa’s use, waits in vain for her guest to arrive.  They meet again when Holappa hangs around the cinema one night.  We can guess how long he’s been hanging around from the pile of fag ends beside him in the street.

    Aki Kaurismäki’s two previous films, Le Havre (2011) and The Other Side of Hope (2017), were both concerned with the experience of refugees (Gabonese and Syrian respectively) in Western Europe (France and Finland respectively).  This latest piece focuses on characters that, as far as we can tell, have lived in Finland all their lives.  It must be said we can’t tell very far.  An earlier Kaurismäki film (the only one of his that I’d seen before Le Havre and The Other Side of Hope) was The Man Without a Past (2002) – a condition that applies to nearly all the characters in Fallen Leaves.  Kaurismäki supplies no information on Holappa’s background.  We learn that Ansa’s small house was inherited from her godmother; and that her father and brother died as a result of alcohol addiction.  She tells Holappa that when he eventually makes it round to her place for dinner.  Since it’s clear where his priorities lie – he enjoys the simple food less than he regrets the paucity of booze on offer – it seems that Ansa and Holappa are, as a couple, also without a future.

    They go their separate ways temporarily:  Ansa starts grim-looking manual work in a factory; Holappa gets another building site job, which he also loses after drinking on it.  Staying in a hostel, he decides to kick his habit.  He smartens himself up and heads round to Ansa’s; when he moves out of the frame, a screech of brakes is enough to tell us that he doesn’t reach his destination.  Ansa, meanwhile, has adopted a waif and stray in canine form, an evidently elderly dog called Chaplin.  She learns from Huotari that Holappa was hit by a train and is in a coma.  She visits him in hospital.  He eventually recovers consciousness, though his first question is, ‘Am I dead?’  In the film’s closing scene, Ansa, Holappa and the dog walk off – walk home, it seems – together.

    Kaurismäki’s films are never long but Fallen Leaves, at eighty-one minutes, is unusually short.   That still leaves plenty of time for the writer-director to remind us of his trademark pessimism, deadpan humour and love of cinema.  The last of these, more prominent in Le Havre than in The Other Side of Hope, is even more salient here.  The film that Ansa and Holappa see together is the absurdist zombie comedy The Dead Don’t Die, by Jim Jarmusch, whose work has often been compared to Kaurismäki’s.  Leaving the screening, Ansa tells Holappa, with no hint of a smile, ‘I’ve never laughed so much’.  The cinema is also showing, among other things, Brief Encounter but movie references aren’t confined to this obvious location.  As well as Chaplin, there’s a poster for Rocco and His Brothers on a wall of the karaoke bar.  In one instance, Kaurismäki seems to be lampooning pretentious cinema-going:  two vaguely pompous middle-aged men emerging from The Dead Don’t Die discuss whether it was more Bressonian than Godardian.  This, according to Philip Concannon’s Sight and Sound (December 2023) review, is ‘one of the film’s funniest [gags]’ and it certainly got a laugh in NFT2.  The trouble is, whenever a film-maker pokes fun at cinephile culture, plenty of those who partake in it will congratulate themselves on getting the joke.  The film’s deadpan humour, visual and verbal, is often more satisfying.  Receiving Ansa’s address for the second time, Holappa carefully places the paper on which it’s written in his jacket pocket and, after a nicely-timed pause, zips the pocket for good measure.  When Ansa visits the hospital, a nurse (Maria Heiskanen) suggests that she read to Holappa as this may help bring him round.  Ansa dutifully picks up a magazine and regales the patient with the story of a student who cannibalised his girlfriend.

    Pessimism isn’t in short supply in Fallen Leaves. The supermarket powers-that-be are only the start.  Each time Ansa turns on the radio, there’s the latest news of the war in Ukraine.  Geography makes this an especially troubling subject for Finns – an intractable one, too:  Ansa eventually exclaims, ‘This bloody war!’ and stops listening to the radio.  Holappa’s accident, just when he’s trying to sort himself out, might seem to sum up Kaurismäki’s bleak outlook:  life as a bad joke.  As in this film’s two immediate predecessors, though, he likes his main characters too much to despair.  There are times when Kaurismäki seems almost to be arguing with himself about this – a big part of what makes Fallen Leaves so increasingly likeable.  Distinctively likeable, too, because, although the tone of his film-making seems far removed from romantic comedy, Kaurismäki has things play out here using a rom-com envelope – even beyond Ansa and Holappa.  While Liisa continues to be amused by Huotari’s delusions of sexy youthfulness, the karaoke king’s romantic persistence is eventually, if tentatively, rewarded.

    Another big part of the success of Fallen Leaves is the excellent lead actors.  Although Zaida Bergroth’s Tove (2020) was frustrating, Alma Pöysti often impressed in the title role.  Kaurismäki’s approach dictates that Pöysti shows a narrower range here but her understated acting is still nuanced and emotionally powerful.  She’s splendidly partnered by Jussi Vartanen, whom I’d seen before only in the Finnish television drama Man in Room 301 (2019).  In Fallen Leaves, Vartanen is even more straight-faced than his co-star but he’s still expressive, and has a hangdog charm.  Chaplin (real name Alma) does good work, too, even if it’s no surprise that s/he lost out in the Palm Dog category at this year’s Cannes (where Fallen Leaves won the Jury Prize) to the dog in Justine Triet’s Anatomy of a Fall.  As in Le Havre and The Other Side of Hope, Kaurismäki’s choice of music also contributes very positively.  Besides the karaoke in the bar, there’s a terrific song performed there by a female group (I haven’t found out what it is):  the contrast between its dynamic music and weltschmerz-heavy lyrics give the number a real charge.  The film’s Finnish title translates literally as ‘Dead Leaves’ and the French standard ‘Les feuilles mortes’ is the closing song on the soundtrack.  The Anglophone world knows the song as ‘Autumn Leaves’; the less starkly gloomy register of its English title reflects pretty well the closing mood of  Aki Kaurismäki’s film.

    1 December 2023

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