“Good luck, Leo Grande!”

[Trigger warning: body image/shape; sex.]

[Spoiler alert: although the ending of the movie is not discussed, some details of the film are given.]

Last night I felt the need to relax with some light-hearted movie that would be easy to watch without being dumb, so I decided to risk it with the film “Good luck, Leo Grande!” And was pleasantly surprised. 

First of all, it’s one of those movies, like “The great Kahuna”, that is basically nothing more than two people in a room and their conversations. And that’s probably the best feature of this film: the topics of conversation, and how and where they arise — from what is supposed to be a “merely sexual” relationship. 

The movie starts from clichés, is built on clichés: the retired female school-teacher who’s had almost no sexual experience beyond the limited and unsatisfying one with her husband, who’s never even experienced an orgasm, who has dedicated her life to family & work, “following all the rules”, and then freed from her responsibilities as mother, wife, and teacher, has finally decided to try and explore her sexuality; the young, beautiful male sex worker who acts confident and happy with his life and job but who cannot share his real identity even with the people closest to him because they cannot, or don’t want to, accept him as he is, and who actually was rejected by his own mother because of how he was/is. 

On the one hand, I think that one of the values of this film lies in taking these clichés, which are also examples of how we still hyper-sexualize some bodies (e.g. the young, fit ones) and de-sexualize others (e.g. the aging female), among others, and putting them right in our faces in a light-hearted way (indeed, the movie is classified as “comedy”) that can nonetheless give us food for thought. 

On the other, I find the topics that are covered in the characters’ conversations and interactions to be very meaningful and relevant, such as: “body positivity”; loving one’s own body as being different from vanity; the beauty and importance of physical pleasure, whether it’s solitary or shared, given or taken; the beauty and naturalness of sex but also it being totally okay to have or want no sex; power dynamics; the importance of healthy, safe boundaries; child-parent relationship; motherhood; the responsibilities of being an educator; the status of sex workers; the toxicity and harmfulness of many social and cultural constructs; the personal liberation that can come also from one’s own relationship with their body (and possibly sexuality)…