Lena Dunham and Emma Thompson bring sneaky sex to Sundance

In her introduction to her Sundance Film Festival launch, Timbre (done via Zoom and delivered to all of us on our couches; Welcome to the virtual festival), Lena Dunham called the movie she wrote, directed and shot during the pandemic, “My Most Personal Project”.

It’s a masterpiece from Dunham, whose most famous work has always been inseparable from the creator himself — semi-autobiographical films and series… or at least, through public image, marketing and her press reports, carry the illusion of that.

Timbre came out 11 years after the first and last feature film – hers, independent lover Tiny furniture, she is very personal cast her mother and best friend to play those roles. And transparent HBO’s Process Girls, the media had difficulty determining where Dunham ended and Hannah Horvath, a generation of millennials in her Brooklyn faces the ravages of, if all too common, the personality cocktail of altruism and narcissism, begins.

Dunham has always been an open book (she literally wrote a). Okay the escape of Girls, her post-implementation review, and Dunham’s various controversies, she remained in fervent ideology even as she purposely removed herself from it, and that kind of introduction— “most personal project”—certainly.

In one interview with The Hollywood ReporterDunham is basically saying that the movie is about her during a tumultuous period at the start of the pandemic, after she herself contracted COVID.

‘s short diary Timbre It is the story of a 26-year-old girl named Sarah Jo (Kristine Froseth), who had an emergency hysterectomy when she was 15 and therefore did not participate in the sexual experiment that her friends Her litter did. “I went into menopause at 17,” she says at a pivotal moment in the film.

But after introspection and perhaps misinterpretation, a bit too much of her mother’s sex and relationship frank talk (Jennifer Jason Leigh) and adopted sister (ZolaTaylor Paige) freely in front of her, she makes a suggestion that she should have sex and that it should be with the father (Jon Bernthal) of the special needs boy she babysits.

(For a little insight into the “personal” nature of this, Dunham underwent a hysterectomy in 2018 for complications related to endometriosis. Around the same time. , she and her longtime boyfriend, Jack Antonoff, break up, her and her Creative partner Jenni Konner cut ties, and she went to rehab. “It’s about trying to understand the impact of [my hysterectomy] was on me,” Dunham said. “It’s about handling my life. And then, obviously, it becomes about the characters — not about you at all. “)

What follows is a fascinating, if somewhat eerie, sexual awakening to witness. Sarah Jo is 26 years old, but she’s also in the midst of arresting development. Everything from her clothes to her innocence reads the innocent little girl; At one point, we learned that she didn’t even know what porn was. She’s stuck at the very young age of 17.

How awkward or powerful it is to watch this sheltered person fumble in a live course on sex, mistaking physicality for pleasure with all the ignorance of a high school student, but self-esteem. about the body of an adult? That’s why Dunham’s lightning rod status appeared.

In the hours since Timbre premiering “at” Sundance on Saturday night, every other tweet either reacts to it or praises its candid exploration of sexual confusion, complaining about Sarah Jo’s overwhelming lack of sexual understanding. , admiring the way it manages to inject a certain sweetness and complexity into a tale of a long exhausted babysitter and father, or in other words expressing impatience and appreciation where Dunham and her views on sexual relationships — both with others and with one’s self — are back on screen.

Diversity of opinion is a necessity, and one on which Dunham is, at least based that CHEAP posts, seems to have understood. What’s surprising is the film’s near-face-to-face conversation with another big Saturday night premiere.

In the early evening you can watch Emma Thompson star as a cautious widow trying to experience all sorts of sexual activities, her long, boring, chaste marriage could never afford her Good luck to you, Leo Grande. Leo Grande is an escort. He’s played by Daryl McCormack, in an amusing performance. Readers: He’s sensational in every way. Someone like him shouldn’t be human, but I’m glad he is. My God.

Then, in prime time, you can watch Dunham’s creation, Sarah Jo, try to do the same thing: essentially, tick boxes of sexual behavior that they feel they need to do in order to do so. feel completely like women, like sexual creatures, like they lived. They are also scared and awkward — and often misinterpreted as to what they really want — while doing it.

Good luck to you, Leo Grande unfolds almost like a play. Thompson’s character is first seen as nervous, waiting for the young escort she hired to show up. She spent weeks — months… no, years — looking into this. But now that she’s an older woman, without a husband and grown children, she decided it would be a shame not to undergo certain sexual acts. She has never done anything but evangelize with her husband, her only sexual partner. It’s uncomfortable and a bit torturous, but maybe paying someone is the best way to do it, especially since she doesn’t want to just sleep with old men. She wants to feel sexually active with a young man.

Sundance Film Festival

The movie is essentially a two-armed one, in which Thompson and McCormack puzzle over what they’re comfortable with, how much they need to know about each other, and mostly what it takes to free themselves from insecurities. security and shame about sex. There’s an immediate, intimate connection they have that isn’t sexual, except for that – the depth they have with each other is more emotional than any attempt at “talking dirty” or “playing around.” ever had. There are start and stop points. A lot of people aren’t at all, trying to snoop around for different sex acts, but mostly – and, for them, all of a sudden – a lot says a lot about their lives, their personalities. wants to create, and the marriage of the two, reality and fiction, can both heal and destroy them.

It’s the cutest movie ever. Of course it is. It has Emma Thompson dancing between she’s the sexiest and the most vulnerable personas, her twin assassin. It is also, to use the word completely grotesque, brave. Actually no. Delete that. It’s true.

Thompson shows off a lot in this role. But that is secondary to its rawness, its willingness to admit how to be a mother, a wife, a widow, a professional, and someone who has had a bad life. Sexual tigers can forgive themselves, understand themselves, accept themselves, and can even entertain the idea of ​​orgasm.

To be clear, Timbre and Good luck… They are very different movies. But there’s a lot to think about after watching them back.

We are a society rooted in both judgment and assumptions, without realizing that the two are diametrically opposed. When Sarah Jo decided to be a sex person in Timbre, Bernthal’s character doesn’t shut her down – he’s a typical rude dude anyway – but he’s shocked. How can 26 years old still be a virgin? And Sarah Jo, she feels the only way to make this work is to be completely open: This is the hysterectomy story, and these are my scars. Now, please, will you make love to me?

In Good luck… Leo was surprised that Thompson’s character never had an orgasm. What’s interesting about it, however, isn’t what concerns her. She wrote it down as an impossibility. She just wants to experience a to-do list of sexual acts. But, as it turns out, she experiences what it means to really know someone, find a fiery emotional connection, and then fuel her sex drive.

It was a coincidence on the show that different ideas of motherhood appeared in both films. In TimbreJudgments of “good” and “bad” about motherhood, pregnancy, and fertility are essential, if not tied, topics for sex talkers. It’s everywhere. And in Good luck…, Thompson and McCormack appear to be in a duel trying to figure out the truth about what the other thinks motherhood means, and the relationship of motherhood and motherhood to such an influencer. to one’s entire existence. Even, God forbid, sex.

There are superficial comparisons made between both films. Both have checklists of different sexual goals to do. Both find the protagonist paralyzed by unsafe sex, but are determined to overcome it. Both are oriented towards the ability to strike.

But more than that, both illustrate the inability to accept who you are, especially when you include gender in the equation. They illustrate the drastic measures that may be required to achieve that enlightenment and satisfaction, and what it means to overcome the toxic diversions that such measures can lead you into. But they are necessary.

It’s also interesting to see the meta, the baggage one person brings to both stories. Take filmmaking out of the equation and both are telling the same worthwhile stories with the same goals, albeit from characters at different extremes. However, viewers were ready to be instantly mesmerized by Emma Thompson. And they were ready for immediate defense and skepticism about Lena Dunham, and were.

Those assumptions, those assumptions, are as much a part of these films as any movie about sex and awakening. Like one, like both, love both, hate all: that, at least, is something to consider.