She has booked a room in a hotel as luxurious as it is impersonal and seems to be preparing feverishly for an intoxicating tryst. False lead… or almost. For the first time in her life, Nancy, a widow who has always led a monotonous existence where fantasy and pleasure were not on the program, called on a specialized site to a “sex worker” to discover in his company sensual territories that she has never dared to explore. Is it never too late to discover the joys (among others) of fellatio and cunnilingus? We must see.
When there is a knock on her bedroom door, the heroine discovers the one she has paid for: Leo, in his twenties, a charming little face, a dreamy face and attentiveness at all times. Intimidated and ashamed, Nancy does not know what to do with her embarrassment, her body numbed by decades of boredom and loses herself in justifications that no one has asked of her. Leo, elegant and professional down to his fingertips and with his resolutely “ultra brite” smiles, does everything to relax his “client” and free her from her complexes. In vain.
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Little by little, over the meetings that follow this chaste first tete-a-tete, the two characters get to know each other. In the absence of exuberant erotic cavalcades, they indulge in confidences that reveal unsuspected aspects of their respective personalities. Specialists, each in their own way, in the art of denial and dissimulation, the two protagonists realize that their encounters, first fixed for reasons that had nothing spiritual about them, allow them to tell each other and that ‘there is no reason to regret it.
Emma Thompson, the return
We forget the impasses of gravelly farce like the marked paths of syrupy romantic comedy. In My dates with Leothe Australian Sophie Hyde, on a skilful scenario conceived by the English actress Katy Brand, plays on the unity of place (a hotel room, therefore) to stage a film which, despite its redundancies and its appearance of “filmed theatre”, lays bare its characters with much more audacity than its argument would suggest.
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This film, both raw and delicate, “mixes up” its many subjects of study (the need to experience desire at all ages, the damage caused by the obsession with eternal youth, the deep wounds linked to family trauma ) with a humor and a subtlety not so frequent and, above all, benefits from the amazing performances of its two actors. Daryl McCormack, impeccable in the role of the deceptively impassive playboy and, above all, Emma Thompson, imperial in the skin of this widow, former teacher by profession, who proves to herself that it is never too late to get out of its sad hinges. Thirty years ago, the British actress won an Oscar for best actress for her role in Return to Howards End, by James Ivory. If a new consecration were to take place three decades later, no one would howl with scandal.
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“My dates with Leo”. Released November 30.
“My appointments with Leo”, by Sophie Hyde: a blowjob or a confession?