Even in its truncated virtual Covid-afflicted form last year, the Sundance Film Festival was remarkably able to debut several movies that a year later we are still talking about in the Oscar conver…
premiering today at Sundance, where to put it mildly, she knocks it out of the park. This is Thompson at her best, a witty, dazzling. and above all in this two-hander is equally good in the movie which centers on a 60ish widowed mother of two and religious studies teacher who hires a sex worker for a tryst in a hotel room.
Thompson plays Nancy Stokes whose nice but uneventful marriage of 31 years to a good but unexciting man ended with his death a couple of years ago. She has two grown kids, one ason she thinks is pretty unremarkable, and she teaches Religious Studies. At 60+ she also has summoned the courage to take one more whack at life and works up the nerve to hire a young sex worker who goes by the professional name of Leo Grande .
Brand and Hyde break this story up into four acts essentially, the second meeting one where Nancy comes in with a prepared list of sexual activities she is willing and wanting to check off her “f**kit” list, no deviations please and let’s get them out of the way. But with this outing her curiosity about Leo as a person starts to come front and center, increasing to a dangerous place when she hits too many nerves in their third meeting, or act 3, where raw feelings and privacy invasions erupt.
This is a character study for both Thompson and McCormack to dive into with abandon , and that they do erasing inhibitions physically, but adding them up in other ways that makes this sexual cat and mouse game never less than fascinating to watch where it takes us – and them – next. It is a movie about shedding the past, forging intimacy on more than one level, making human connections, and discovering a whole new you.
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