The painting that got Emma Thompson through a nude scene
In the closing scene of Good Luck To You, Leo Grande, Emma Thompson‘s character Nancy ends a journey of sexual exploration by lovingly gazing at herself naked in the mirror. As a 55-year-old widow who had a stilted sex life with her husband, she’d employed the help of sex worker Leo Grande, the culmination of their journey together being that she no longer needed anyone but herself to feel fully content in her body. It’s a rare onscreen moment where an older woman is positioned not as a cougar or a dowdy housewife but as an independent, now sexually liberated person.
The film was a radical look at sex and self-acceptance, in part because it’s highly unusual to have an older woman exploring these themes on screen. Thompson was hailed as “brave” for shooting nude moments, which she rallied against: “It’s just a disguised version of, ‘It’s brave of an old, fat lady to take her clothes off.'” That said, if it’s not brave, then it’s something new – which makes Thompson’s sources of inspiration so intriguing, given it came from paintings from the 1500s.
She has previously shared how challenging the film’s final moments were, initially wondering how she’d tackle it without bringing her own vulnerabilities to the nude scene and letting Nancy’s moment be uninterrupted by her own relationship with her body. “I thought, ‘How am I going to dissociate from myself and my own issues with my body that have always been there?'” In order to create some separation, she started looking at paintings of Adam and Eve – in “a more innocent time”, as she put it to Vanity Fair.
Thompson chose the iconic image because Eve inhibits her nude body with no shame, covering herself with only leaves and not yet knowing why she should feel anything other than comfortable. It’s a powerful parallel to Nancy’s character, who has internalised a great deal of shame after failing to orgasm with her husband. “I realise that whenever I stood in front of a mirror, I was always holding something in or standing in a particular way just in order to make myself more acceptable to myself,” explained Thompson, who wanted to mirror Eve’s sense of ease.
She looked to Renaissance artist Lucas Cranach’s vision of Adam and Eve for inspiration, eventually adopting Eve’s stance in the film’s final moments. “When I was trying to work out how I wanted her to stand, I went and looked at all the old medieval pictures of Eve in the Garden of Eden,” she told NPR.
“Because I thought, well, she wasn’t self-conscious. I wonder how – I know it’s all male artists, but at the same time, all those medieval Eves are standing kind of – and Adam – they just stand with one leg slightly bent, very relaxed. And that’s what I took for my inspiration for her stance.”
