First Take | Falling in love, with a thud

The first thought that came to my mind after watching an absolutely charming film called Good Luck To You, Leo Grande — which Wikipedia in all its wisdom describes as a ‘sex comedy’ which is like calling Devdas a love triangle—was, why can’t we make something similar in India with Shabana Azmi in the lead?

On second thoughts, forget it! Rendering Sophie Hyde’s, Leo Good Luck To You Grande in the Indian context would require a whole lot of cleansing in the plot. We can’t have a 65-year lately widowed wife and mother who seeks the services of a very handsome young gigolo (or sex worker, as the politically correct term happens to be) to give her an orgasm: in forty years of her marriage Nancy (Emma Thompson) has never experienced an orgasm.
She wants the experience at least once. Now, if this sounds like a sex comedy, then it is not. Far from it. What the great Emma Thompson does to her character is to give it a life beyond the sheer physicality of the plot.

To say Good Luck To You, Leo Grande is about a stuffy British woman and a rakish sex escort is way too frivolous. This is a film that advocates stark honesty about sexual desires and needs: a privilege and luxury that is denied to women past 50 (not men, though) in most societies including the so-called liberal ones.

Taken as a treatise on female sexuality past the age of consent, this is a very important piece of cinema, throbbing with delightfully forbidden dialogues on parental responsibilities, sexual satisfaction and body-claiming (a sort of counterpoint to body-shaming) where the woman is well past her prime, is given the right to love her own physical assets, no matter how out of shape.

All this may seem like an invitation to a film leaden with sexual statements. Let me hasten to clarify, Good Luck To Rio Grande is first and foremost, a very charming piece of cinema, almost like a Pretty Woman in reverse: imagine if Julia Roberts was the millionaire and Richard Gere the hooker, and imagine if Julia was 30 years older and Richard 20 years younger.

The merger of two worlds: one elitist and sexually blanked out and the other streetwise and sexually vibrant and yet somehow innocent manipulative motives, is brilliantly balanced in the film. No words can suffice to describe what Emma Thompson brings to her role. I wonder if even Meryl Streep could have brought to the film that sense of urgent sexual nullity that Emma Thompson does.

And the sex worker, played by the Irish-American young actor Daryl McCormack, is just the right fit. Utterly charming, slightly mysterious and in no way a sad tragic sex worker, Leo is much more than what Nancy’s money can buy for a few hours.

So does Nancy finally get her first Big O? I am not telling. Suffice it to say she comes away from her four meetings with Leo Grande, happier more fulfilled than she had imagined. Dare I say the happy hooker too goes away a richer pleasure provider in more ways than money can buy.

The last shot of the film has Emma Thompson starring at her fully nude body in the mirror, probably wondering if her life as an emotionally corseted widow and mother would ever be the same again.

Coincidentally the other interesting film, though far less smooth than Good Luck To You, Leo Grande, also features an older woman (though far less old than Emma Thompson) attracted to a younger man (far less younger than Daryl McCormack). The desirable woman in Cooper Raiff’s Cha Cha Real Smooth is the fatally attractive Dakota Johnson who we are told repeatedly is much older than Cooper Raiff who not only directs but also plays the lead in this uneven but engaging rom-com.

Raiff casting himself is a bit like Feroz Khan casting himself as Kamal Haasan in the Nayakan remake. I think Raiff is a director is worth watching out for. I am not too sure as an actor he is worth watching. There is a nagging annoying goofiness to his personality that comes in the way of the more intense exchanges in Cha Cha Real Smooth where his character Andrew tries to convince Domino (Dakota Johnson) that she is about to marry the wrong man. The right man, needless to say, being Andrew. Domino is not convinced. Neither are we.

In this one-sided quest for love, I found Cooper Raiff reaching into the same riffs of desperation as in his debut film as actor-director Shithouse. In that film, Cooper played Alex, a fresh collegian who was besotted by a girl whom he befriends one night at a party. When the next day she refuses to recognize him Alex is shattered.

In Cha Cha Real Smooth, I found Andrew’s relationship with Domino’s 15-year-old autistic daughter Lola (Vanessa Burghardt) far more interesting and convincing. With Domino, I felt Andrew was attracted to her because she was unattainable, distant. I found Andrew ‘s friendship with Lola very real. While Domino doesn’t quite look like a 15-year-old’s mother (again a spot of miscasting, Dakota is the co-producer) Andrew and Lola are my preferred pair in Cha Cha Real Smooth.

Andrew treats Lola with a blend of the paternal and the filial. She in turn, allows him to scratch her back before sleep, something only her mother is allowed to do.

This is a film with a surplus of mismatched couples. While Domino and Andrew, the central characters can never be a couple, no one, not even Domino, is sure that the man she is ready to marry is right for her. Andrew’s mother (played with immense warmth by Leslie Mann) looks more like his elder sister and Andrew’s kid brother David(played with wondrous warmth by Evan Assante) is more Andrew’s son’s age.

It took me nearly the entire playing time of Cha Cha Real Smooth (the title comes from that super-contagious dance track Cha Cha Slide by Mr C The Slide Man) to figure out that mismatched couple is what makes this film, and life, is all about. How boring when Boy Meets Girl and they are made for each other. How much more exciting when the relationship needs a whole lot of working on and ironing out, and at the end of it all, there may not be any payoff.

At the end of Cha Cha Real Smooth, Andrew’s kid brother gets his first kiss. But Andrew doesn’t get Domino. She will marry the wrong man and probably regret it…But then you never know with life or love.

Amanda Sthers’ Italian-French romantic drama Promises is very difficult to watch. Not because of its intrinsic back-and-forth in time that the plot subjects us to.

No, it’s something else. There are at least five other films with the same title some of them very recent and therefore easy to mix up. But this is the Promises that you have to promise yourself you must see. It is deep and colourful, pristine and passionate. It is about love at first sight. But the protagonists are not teenyboppers. They are mature adults who know their responsibilities, and no they don’t think sacrifices are for saints and martyrs.

Alexander (played by the karmic chameleon Italian actor Pierfrancesco Favino) is neither saint nor sinner. He is a man who has been incredibly unlucky in love. In a tragic drowning accident, filmed as a flashback in a glaze of sun heat and water, young Alexander loses his father. It is as defining a moment in Alexander’s life as the death of Apu’s mother In Satyajit Ray’s Apur Sansar. It changes Alexander’s worldview. Overnight the teenager becomes a man.

But what does it mean to be a man? Alexander goes through radical shifts in his life. Now married to a kind lovely woman and with a sweet daughter, he meets Laura (Kelly Reilly). It is what is known as love at first sight.

What follows is a tempestuous battle between family responsibility and self-gratification with the former winning the battle of the conscience hands-down. There is a defining moment in the doomed romance when Alexander gets a call from his best friend (Deepak Varma) from a phone booth telling Alexander to get Laura minutes before she is to marry another man.

Laura stands outside the phone booth, waiting. What follows is straight out of a soap opera. But this is an opera played in reverse. Novelist turned director Amanda Sthers takes all the soapy elements out of the love opera, leaving us with a story that is stark and sensuous.

I will never forget the visually resplendent mise en scene where Alexander stands in a phone both below Laura’s house with her husband. He waits for her to come down.The whole interlude is bathed in an orange-crimson colour, to remind us that happy endings to love stories are only for the movies.

Promises is a film rich in body and mind. It cruelly contextualizes idealized love in terms of the battering that it takes in the practical world. The narrative is exasperating in its time passages, going back and forth with the unpredictability of an eccentric storyteller who has no patience with the audiences’ need for order in the plot.

Promises captures the chaos of a broken heart in a language that is lyrical and languorous. Don’t look for easy solutions in this film to the conundrum of the heart. Promises will frustrate and anger you. It will also leave you deeply moved. It is what good films are supposed to do.

Subhash K Jha is a Patna-based film critic who has been writing about Bollywood for long enough to know the industry inside out. He tweets at @SubhashK_Jha.

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