(The review contains spoilers.)

As a feminist, when I watch movies, I need to often turn off my critical self if I am to laugh along with the audience. Either the plot is disappointing, or the lens is male-gaze-centric.

Very rarely do I enjoy a movie while being my obnoxiously loud feminist self.

But there’s one movie that has left me as high as a kite: ‘Good Luck to you, Leo Grande,’ a Hulu original released two months ago.

Directed by award-winning Sophie Hyde, the film had its world premiere at the 2022 Sundance Film Festival in January 2022.

The film centres around the story of two protagonists, Nancy Stokes and Leo Grande, and what happens between them over a series of meeting in a hotel room. Stokes is a widower and a retiring educator who misses the excitement of youth and romance in her life. Grande is a young sex worker, a Black man, who offers his services for a hefty charge to older women.

Stokes, played by the two-time Academy Award-winning actress Emma Thompson, hires Grande for his services. But she is overcome with apprehension, shame, and jitteriness when she first meets Grande, and in every encounter, she tries to talk herself out of the arrangement.

Grande, played by actor Daryl McCormack of the BBC series Peaky Blinders, is quite the opposite of uptight Stokes. While Stokes is judgemental and struggles with the ideas of masturbation and pleasure, Grande is accepting and sex-positive.

Stokes’ journey of sexual exploration is funny, heartfelt, inspiring, and refreshing.

But what struck me is that this isn’t just a British sex comedy that is funny and enlightening but also equally political.

Hegemonically, movies with any suggestive or sexual content often portray sex as an act done to women, often without any explicit communication of consent.

‘Good Luck to You, Leo Grande’ comes as a breath of fresh air, for Stokes decides all the ‘W’s–who to have sex with, where, when, and how. By giving Stokes the agency in her sexual encounters, it defies the norm and more than that, the movie centres on her pleasure.

In the very beginning itself, through brilliant and well-paced screenwriting, Katy Brand, an actress and writer known for Katy Brand’s Bigg Ass Show (2007), head-on tackles the orgasm gap.

Stoke’s failure to orgasm during sex, despite years of sexual enactments with her dead husband, is cleverly delivered in a powerful scene.

Recollecting the monotonous routine of her sex life with her husband, Stokes says, “he would rub my shoulders and breasts a bit and then would climb on top, do the business, kiss my cheek, roll off, put his pyjamas back on, and go back to sleep”– leaving her dissatisfied with her sexual life.

And that moment becomes symbolic of all women whose pleasure has never been centred during heteronormative sex.

That leads Stokes to hire a devilishly handsome young Grande so that she can finally satisfy her sexual desires. However, it isn’t easy for Stokes.

Stokes tries to talk herself out of it multiple times. Her nervousness, embarrassment, struggle with internalised shame around sex and the denial of her pleasure are prolifically delivered by Thompson.

What Stokes had hoped would be limited to one encounter then turns into a series of meetings in the same hotel room.

However, it isn’t the sex that keeps Stokes wanting to hire Grande. It’s the gradual unlearning of the shame surrounding sex, masturbation, and female pleasure that Stokes undergoes.

The slow and rhythmic process with which Stokes gradually opens up, one session after another, is captivating. From an uptight widower who refuses to touch herself to apologising to her former student for slut shaming her years ago, Stokes doesn’t just discover her body but is also confronted with her internalised notions of the need to control women.

That’s what makes the movie even more realistic.

Stokes isn’t characterised as a perfect woman. She is imperfect and is in no way a feminist. She disapproves of girls wearing short skirts, for she equates the length of the skirt to their character.

But through many short-lived but powerful moments, the filmmakers highlight Stokes’ willingness to make amends for her mistakes–by apologising. And that’s what makes the movie more feminist.

In another feminist move, Brand and Hyde redefine intimacy.

The conversations Stokes and Grande have before their sexual enactments, even before their first kiss, make the show intimate.

Of course, the impeccable compatibility of Thompson and McCormack on screen and the sculpted body of McCormack add to that intimacy. But the rawness and vulnerability both their characters bring to the room makes the entire film experience sensual.

Thompson and McCormack do not just stand unclothed in front of the cameras, but they are real. Hints of pubic hair on Grande, Stokes’ saggy breasts and her apron belly make very brief appearances on screen. That makes the film even more sincere.

But the cinematography left me perplexed because none of the sex scenes sexualised either of them. It’s quite ironic that the sex scenes weren’t sexualised. And perhaps, one might say that it defeats the purpose. But instead, it was thrilling and breathtaking.

The movie realistically portrays sexual encounters with strangers where one is confronted with their flawed selves. Stokes is left naked to deal with the insecurities of her physical appearance and a lack of sexual experience.

Grande is insecure about his mother’s disapproval of him. And as they confront themselves in the presence of the other, it makes them even more relatable.

That relatability made it intimate. For at moments, I vicariously lived through each of the characters–sometimes as Stokes, sometimes as Grande.

By the end of it, Stokes self-pleasures herself and orgasms too, which is delivered in a very evocative scene. The audience can vicariously live through her orgasmic release.

However, this film isn’t just about a woman orgasming for the first time. It is about the constant communication of consent, the importance of setting and respecting your partners’ boundaries and centring their pleasure during sex. It is about the journey of sexual exploration and the normalisation of sex as a normal and intimate exchange between two human beings.

Thompson and McCormack are such prolific and bold actors and perhaps the best duo to tackle the issues of ageism, sexual intimacies, and female pleasure.

And oftentimes, after sharing such intense emotions and bodily fluids, one has been naturally wired to expect the protagonists to fall in love. I can list a whole series of romantic comedies right here in that genre.

But that doesn’t happen with Stokes and Grande, and that’s freshening.

It makes one wonder if not all human connections are meant to last. Some human connections are there just to make you realise some things about yourself, or maybe to just help you orgasm.