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      ‘Mood’ Is a Genre-Bending Show About Social Media and Sex Work

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      “Mood,” a BBC America series created by Nicôle Lecky, blends music, comedy and gritty realism to explore the opportunities and risks for young women online.LONDON — A few years ago, Nicôle Lecky was shown a website that attempted to expose the personal details of women on Instagram because of their involvement in sex work. Lecky’s reaction was “instinctive,” she said in a recent interview, adding that it was one of those things that, as a writer, “you just feel compelled to write about.”She briefly thought about the dramatic potential of looking at who built the site, Lecky said, but her mind quickly turned to the subjects of their disdain — the women themselves. “That’s whose story I really want to engage with,” she noted.In a flurry, Lecky, now 32, wrote the first draft of “Superhoe,” an 85-minute one-woman show that she performed at the Royal Court Theater in London in 2019. That story has made its way onscreen with “Mood,” a sleek six-episode series that premieres Sunday on BBC America.Lecky plays the 25-year-old Sasha, brokenhearted and struggling, both financially and psychologically. She is soon drawn into the orbit of Carly (Lara Peake), a seemingly archetypal influencer, clad in athleisure and flush with cash, before falling into the dopamine loop of social media and, ultimately, sex work — first through videos on DailyFans, the show’s version of OnlyFans, and eventually through escorting.Carly (Lara Peake), left, invites Sasha (Nicôle Lecky) into her apparently glamorous world.Natalie Seery/BBC StudiosThrough Sasha’s trajectory, Lecky — who, as well as writing and executive producing the show, also helped create music for it — explores the gray area between empowerment and exploitation. As part of the production process, she spoke to women about their experiences of sex work, which produced complex feelings in her, she said.“If you are financially secure, and you’re happy and healthy, and you want to go and be a sex worker, go for it,” Lecky said, before underlining that some of the women she had spoken to wanted a different life. “I talk a lot about choice and if you have the choice,” she added. “And if you don’t, I think you should be able to live in a world where you don’t have to make money solely from having sex.”F., a 29-year-old who works in the sex industry, was among those who spoke to Lecky. She requested to be identified only by her first initial to protect her privacy. In a phone interview, she said that she appreciated the show’s depiction of “elements of the good and bad” of the industry, while showing that sex work attracted a variety of people. “You’ve got some of the girls that are lawyers and have fantastic professions,” F. said. “Everyone does this.”“A lot of people don’t understand or don’t want to understand why girls do it,” she added.Sex work is a central tenet of the show, but so too is a study of how that industry intersects with race and class. Sasha is often fetishized — her alias is “Lexi Caramel,” the “Caramel” a racialized addition by Carly. While on a job, another Black escort warns Sasha that they have to play by different rules than their white counterparts, adding that Sasha needs to be careful not to end up “damaged or dead.”Again and again, Sasha is shown operating in a world that ends up hardening her. Lecky likens Sasha to “someone you might see at a bus stop screaming on the phone and you think, ‘Oh my God, they’re a handful,’ but you don’t know their story.”“Sasha, to me, was very much based on the girls I went to school with,” she added.Lecky in a London studio last month. As well as writing and executive producing “Mood,” she also helped create music for the show.Ellie Smith for The New York TimesLecky grew up in East London, the daughter of a mental-health nurse and an electrician who formerly worked as a D.J. She loved performing and attended weekend acting classes, she said, and that led to small acting roles and writing jobs as a teenager.She also enjoyed history and politics, she added, and had aspirations to work for the United Nations. She enrolled in a multidisciplinary course at King’s College London to study global conflict, but found it tough to balance her university obligations with her auditions. A producer then suggested that she go to drama school, something that she said she had not considered before. She left college and headed to the Mountview Academy of Theater Arts in London.After graduating, she took jobs as a restaurant hostess and, at one point, retrained in event management, all while continuing to cut her teeth in TV writers’ rooms, onscreen and with places on writer-training initiatives. Those experiences, she said, made her realize that she needed to keep writing, and “Superhoe” came out of that desire to create.Lisa Walters, a producer on “Mood,” recalled being sent “Superhoe” when she was working at Channel 4, one of Britain’s public broadcasters. “I’d read lots of scripts in my role, and it’s always really exciting when you pick one up and you just feel instantly drawn to it,” she said. “Nicôle does have a sort of unapologetic style in her writing where it’s very raw, very real, and it’s authentic.”“Mood,” so called because Sasha expresses her mood, or vibe, through song throughout the show, is also unusual in being a mix of drama, musical and comedy. In one moment, viewers are taken into the depths of gritty realism; in the next, glimpses of Sasha’s internal world emerge through songs and surreal transformations to the world around her, like a family home suddenly turning into a jazz lounge.Lecky has performed songs from the show on radio in Britain. The soundtrack is available to stream.Natalie Seery/BBC StudiosDespite this singular feel, the similarity between Lecky’s rise and that of other female British writers has drawn comparisons. When “Mood” premiered this year in Britain, the news media cited Michaela Coel and Phoebe Waller-Bridge, who also rose to prominence with buzzy one-woman plays, as reference points.Lecky, however, said that she tried to be “blinkered” and to stay focused on her own career. Coel and Waller-Bridge have been supportive, but “I just think everyone’s in their own lane,” she said.In attracting the BBC to adapt “Superhoe” for the screen, it helped that the play had already enjoyed success. As Fiona Campbell, a commissioner at the broadcaster, acknowledged: “We knew it was a very fresh, very well received” piece.Walters, the producer, said that the BBC had “wholeheartedly put their trust in Nicôle in order to realize her vision. They believed in what she had to say.” Walters added that it was “huge” for the broadcaster to allow a new talent to realize her vision exactly how she wanted it to be.Praise for Lecky’s drive is common among those she’s worked with. “Her work ethic is like none I’ve ever seen,” Walters noted. “She worked very, very hard and didn’t leave anything to chance.”“I talk a lot about choice and if you have the choice,” Lecky said. “And if you don’t, I think you should be able to live in a world where you don’t have to make money solely from having sex.”Ellie Smith for The New York TimesLecky frames her ambition as one of contours rather than specifics. “I don’t know if I know exactly where I want to go, but maybe I know where I don’t want to go,” she said.In the spirit of Sasha, she added: “I kind of do think that if you grow up without very much, you get very used to being like, ‘Well, I’ll just do it.’ You kind of make things work.” More

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      Kitten Natividad, Movie Star in Russ Meyer’s Bawdy World, Dies at 74

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      She was top-billed in his final feature, “Beneath the Valley of the Ultra-Vixens.” She was also his paramour and, he said, his favorite leading lady.Kitten Natividad, who brought audacity and ample physical attributes to some of the final films of Russ Meyer, whose over-the-top sexploitation movies acquired a certain cachet in some quarters and influenced John Waters, Quentin Tarantino and other directors, died on Sept. 24 in Los Angeles. She was 74.Eva Natividad Garcia, her sister, said the cause was complications of kidney failure.Ms. Natividad had little film experience and was working as a go-go dancer and stripper when, in the mid-1970s, she met Mr. Meyer, who was by then near the end of his notorious filmmaking career.In the 1960s Mr. Meyer, who died in 2004, became known for outlandish films like “Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!” and “Vixen,” most of which featured absurd plots and insatiable naked women with large breasts.According to Jimmy McDonough’s “Big Bosoms and Square Jaws: The Biography of Russ Meyer, King of the Sex Film” (2005), Mr. Meyer was already editing his 1976 feature, “Up!,” when he decided to add a part for a dancer who had been suggested to him by an actress from one of his earlier films. He asked Roger Ebert, the film critic, who was one of the writers of “Up!,” to throw together some dialogue for a character he named the Greek Chorus.“It doesn’t matter what she says,” Mr. Ebert recalled Mr. Meyer saying. “She just has to say something. And it should sound kinda poetic.”The newcomer was Ms. Natividad, and what Mr. Ebert wrote for her paraphrased the Imagist poet Hilda Doolittle.“Armed with Ebert’s lofty gobbledygook,” Mr. McDonough wrote, “Meyer took the New Girl out in the woods, stripped her down, and made her recite all this complex, arcane narration while she hung from trees and hid in bushes.”Mr. Meyer also fell for Ms. Natividad, who was married at the time, and they began a relationship that lasted for the rest of the 1970s. And he made her the star of his next movie, which would be his final feature film: “Beneath the Valley of the Ultra-Vixens” (1979).The movie is often described as Mr. Meyer’s riff on “Our Town” — for instance, it employed an onscreen narrator named “The Man From Small Town U.S.A.” Ms. Natividad plays a woman whose husband’s preoccupation with anal sex leaves her sexually frustrated.Ms. Natividad had little film experience when she met Mr. Meyer. It didn’t matter.via Siouxzan PerryCritics didn’t have much good to say about the movie, which Mr. Meyer wrote with Mr. Ebert.Gene Siskel of The Chicago Tribune, Mr. Ebert’s television partner on the film review show then known as “Sneak Previews,” wrote that Mr. Meyer’s “Vixen,” released in 1968, had been “an enjoyable nudie film because it featured the first joyfully aggressive woman we’d seen in a skin flick.” But he added, “Meyer hasn’t grown up in 10 years; if anything, he’s deteriorated.”“Beneath the Valley” would be Meyer’s last hurrah, but it held a special place in his heart. In a 1999 interview with Pop Cult magazine, he called Ms. Natividad his favorite leading lady.“She could just go and go and go,” he said. “It was just marvelous. You really had to measure up to this girl, or you caught hell.”Mr. McDonough said that Mr. Meyer had “met his match in Kitten Natividad.”“Meyer’s productions were mercenary boot camps, with the woman inevitably in an adversarial role,” Mr. McDonough said by email. “And in 1979’s ‘Beneath the Valley of the Ultra-Vixens,’ Meyer puts Kitten through the usual insane challenges, perching her buck naked atop mountains, in rivers at the bottom of canyons, and shot from below a metal bed frame (sans mattress) while she bounced vigorously atop metal bedsprings.“She blew through Meyer’s challenges like a marathon runner, always a wide, gung-ho smile across her face, and try as he might, Meyer could not vanquish her. That movie is a dazzling, obsessive tribute to Natividad.”Ms. Natividad in 2011. In her later years, she had small parts in mainstream movies like “Airplane!”Brian Cahn/Zuma Press, via AlamyFrancisca Isabel Natividad (she later used the first name Francesca) was born on Feb. 13, 1948, in the Mexican state of Chihuahua to Juan and Delia Davalos Natividad. In 2018, when she received the Legend of the Year award from the Burlesque Hall of Fame in Las Vegas, she told an audience that when she was growing up along the U.S. border, she would gather other children and make clandestine trips to a disreputable stretch of road where they would peek in on strip shows.“When I looked in there and I saw these beautiful women with the big breasts, the red lipstick, the big hairdos,” she said, “I wanted to grow up to be just like them.”Her mother later moved the family to the United States, and at 14 Ms. Natividad worked as a house cleaner for the actress Stella Stevens, getting a taste of the Hollywood crowd.She got a job as a key punch operator, but when she learned that a neighbor who worked as a stripper was making twice as much as she was, she changed careers, taking her first job as a go-go dancer in 1969 and soon moving to stripping. When an agency urged her to adopt a stage name, she chose “Kitten,” she said, because she was considered the shyest among the dancers she worked with.In 1973 she won the Miss Nude Universe title in San Bernardino, Calif.She was dancing at the Classic Cat, a club in Hollywood, when a fellow dancer, Shari Eubank, who had starred in the 1975 Meyer film “Supervixens,” suggested she introduce herself to the director. She is said to have done so by poking him in the back with her bare breasts.That got her into “Up!,” which she once described this way: “I’ll skip over the plot, which had something to do with Hitler’s daughter and sadomasochism. The film starts with me perched in a tree, nude.”Mr. Meyer paid for her to have breast augmentation, replacing an earlier enhancement. He also paid for a voice coach to help her lose her Mexican accent. (Her dialogue in “Up!” was dubbed.)When she and Mr. Meyer were together, he would revel in the attention her body and her bubbly personality brought. In 2004 Ms. Natividad joined three other Meyer favorites in a round-table discussion for The New York Times; one of them, Erica Gavin, the star of “Vixen,” recalled the couple’s entrance at her birthday party.“Kitten walked in first,” she said. “Russ loved to walk behind Kitten, because then he could see all the reactions after she passed people. She was wearing a nude-colored chiffon sheer outfit with no underwear at all.”After Mr. Meyer’s career died out, Ms. Natividad appeared in numerous other movies, including some hard-core pornography, and had small parts in “Airplane!” (1980), “My Tutor” (1983) and a few other mainstream films. She had a double mastectomy in 1999 as part of treatment for breast cancer.In the 2004 round table, Ms. Natividad reflected on her career.“I’m proud to be a Russ Meyer girl,” she said. “There are lots of beautiful women with great bodies and even bigger boobs than ours, but they didn’t get to be Russ Meyer girls. We are very, very special.”Ms. Natividad was married and divorced three times. In addition to her sister and her mother, she is survived by six half siblings, Teresa Natividad, Amelia Natividad, Diana Ramirez, Victor Ramirez, John Natividad and Estella Ramirez.Mr. McDonough, in his email, said he first saw Ms. Natividad at Show World in Manhattan, where her act consisted of splashing around naked in a baby pool while the song “Rubber Ducky” blared from the loudspeaker. Then, for a few dollars more, she’d pose for Polaroids.“Somehow Kitten made it all seem innocent,” he said. “She possessed a ferociously positive spirit, and that light always blasted through, no matter how tawdry the circumstances.” More

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      in Theater

      Why Did Instagram Pause This Play? Its Creators Still Don’t Know.

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      Marion Siéfert’s “_jeanne_dark_,” about a shy teenager beginning to express her sexuality, contains no nudity yet still ran afoul of Instagram’s opaque policies.PARIS — It was hailed as France’s first “Instagram play.” In Marion Siéfert’s “_jeanne_dark_,” a 16-year-old character, Jeanne, goes live on the app to tell the world about her private frustrations — and as she films herself with a smartphone onstage, Instagram users can watch, too, and weigh in.Yet in early 2021, a few months into the production’s run, Instagram started cutting off these live streams, citing “nudity or sexual acts.” Then the account tied to the play disappeared from the platform’s search results. For months, Siéfert and her team scrambled to understand why their work — which will have its New York premiere on Sept. 14, as part of the French Institute Alliance Française’s Crossing the Line Festival — was being repeatedly targeted.“People thought what we were doing was great, the future of creation,” Siéfert said in Paris earlier this month. “But for me, it’s been more like a nightmare.”Siéfert joins a long list of artists and activists who have locked horns with Instagram in recent years over its community guidelines, which ban content the company deems inappropriate. That includes nudity, and especially photos and videos showing women’s nipples (outside of breastfeeding and health-related issues, like a mastectomy), a policy that has prompted an online campaign, “Free the Nipple.”But “_jeanne_dark_” doesn’t fall into this category: Siéfert, who was aware of the policy, steered clear of nudity from the start. When the automated interruptions started, the artistic team filed appeals through Instagram’s in-app system, yet received no response or clarification. They said their attempts to contact employees of Instagram also went nowhere.Only after a series of mock performances on a private account did Siéfert pinpoint the gesture that apparently triggered Instagram’s detection algorithm. At that point, Helena de Laurens, 33, who plays Jeanne, cupped her covered breasts from the sides and moved them up and down.The scene, which Siéfert cut in the spring of 2021, may have fallen foul of Instagram and Facebook’s infamous policy on “breast squeezing,” which was clarified in 2020 to state that hugging, cupping or holding breasts is allowed, but not squeezing in a grabbing motion, because of a surmised association with pornography. (According to Instagram, no such issue was identified with the account _jeanne_dark_. A spokeswoman declined to answer further questions about the company’s moderation policies.)Helena de Laurens, who plays Jeanne. “I had found something that was very funny, I was quite proud of it,” she said of the play.Matthieu BareyreAccording to research conducted by Dr. Carolina Are, a fellow at Northumbria University’s Center for Digital Citizens in Britain, very few appeals to Instagram trigger a response from a human moderator. “It’s an incredibly murky system,” she said in a recent video interview.She traces the increase in heavy-handed moderation on Instagram and Facebook (both owned by Meta) to two bills that passed in 2018, the Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act and the Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Act. Their stated purpose — to hold tech companies accountable for sex-trafficking schemes on their platforms — has led, she said, to bans on a wide range of material Instagram’s algorithm classifies as risqué, not just in the U.S. but around the world. (It has regularly flagged Dr. Are’s own videos, too, since she is also a pole dance instructor.)“Facebook in particular censored female bodies before, but nothing on this scale,” she said. “It creates a chilling effect on expression.”The gesture at issue in Siéfert’s play came with a narrative context. Jeanne, initially a shy teenager who is bullied at school and feels stifled by her Roman Catholic family — her Instagram handle (_jeanne_dark_) is a pun on the French styling of Joan of Arc — has grown emboldened, and begins a pastiche of sexualized music videos.“I had found something that was very funny, I was quite proud of it,” de Laurens said recently in Paris. “There was something a little grotesque and excessive about it. She parodies people, but she also wants to be like them.”Performing “_jeanne_dark_,” de Laurens said, has proved stressful for other reasons, too. Since she is constantly focused on her character’s smartphone, she sees many of the live — and unscripted — Instagram comments. (The stream is also relayed on screens on both sides of the stage, for the theater audience.) While many comments have been funny, and the production team is quick to ban trolls, some have crossed lines and targeted her body.“I don’t want to think about a comment that says I have terrible teeth while I’m onstage,” de Laurens said. “It takes you out of the performance, and it grates.”This Instagram play wasn’t Siéfert’s first artistic brush with social media. The 35-year-old director, whose own sheltered, Catholic upbringing in the French city of Orléans inspired the character of Jeanne, mined Facebook for information about her audience in her first professional production, “2 or 3 Things I Know About You,” from 2016.Once people responded on Facebook that they were attending the show, Siéfert would study their public profiles to create a script based on them. Onstage, she’d comment on screenshots as her character, a naïve alien looking to make human friends. “I would find out about their holidays, but also intimate things, like a bereavement,” Siéfert said. Some people laughed; others were moved or shocked to see themselves through that lens. “Sometimes the information was very beautiful, but at the same time, it was a lot of power.”“People thought what we were doing was great, the future of creation,” Siéfert said of the play. “But for me, it’s been more like a nightmare.”Julien Mignot for The New York TimesSiéfert’s experimental approach to audience interaction was shaped, she said, by the years she spent in Germany — first as an exchange student in Berlin, where she discovered the local performance scene, and later at Giessen’s Institute for Applied Theatre Studies. With “_jeanne_dark_,” she was “interested in bringing theater to a place that isn’t really made for it, that is part of the fabric of people’s daily lives. What we didn’t know was: Are there actually people who will want to watch us on Instagram?”There were — not least because “_jeanne_dark_” had its premiere in the fall of 2020, between the first two waves of the Covid-19 pandemic in France, as the entire theater industry wondered how to effectively harness digital formats. Between 200 and 600 viewers tuned in for the live streams throughout that first season, and the play was honored with a special “digital award” by France’s Critics’ Union in 2021.Yet as the production met with acclaim, new issues kept arising behind the scenes with Instagram, even after the breast-cupping gesture was removed. According to screenshots provided by Siéfert, “_jeanne_dark_” was cut off a total of four times throughout 2021, twice with two-week bans on further live streams, forcing the team to resort to an alternative account. Ironically, Siéfert said, the theater audience often thought the ban notification was “part of the show.”In addition to “nudity or sexual acts,” the final ban, in November 2021, cited “violence and incitation.”“The rules change constantly, you never know where you stand,” Siéfert said. She alleges that starting in May 2021, the account was also “shadow banned” for weeks — meaning that it became nearly impossible to find through the app’s search engine, and existing followers no longer received live notifications. (According to Instagram, the account _jeanne_dark_ wasn’t flagged in a manner that might have led to such issues.)While Siéfert’s next play, “Daddy,” set to premiere at the Odéon playhouse in Paris in 2023, will delve into another virtual world — a video game — it will involve no screens or live digital element. Her experience with Instagram, which she describes as a “hostile space” for artists, has been enough.“It has often been sold as the app for creativity, but it’s just publicity,” she said. “When you actually put a work of art on Instagram, this is what happens.” More

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      in Movies

      Emma Thompson and the Challenge of Baring All Onscreen at 63

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      It’s the shock of white hair you notice first on Emma Thompson, a hue far more chic than anything your average 63-year-old would dare choose but one that doesn’t ignore her age either. It’s accompanied by that big, wide smile and that knowing look, suggesting both a wry wit and a willingness to banter.And yet, Thompson begins our video call by MacGyvering her computer monitor with a piece of paper and some tape so she can’t see herself. “The one thing I can’t bear about Zoom is having to look at my face,” she said. “I’m just going to cover myself up.”We are here across two computer screens to discuss what is arguably her most revealing role yet. In the new movie “Good Luck to You, Leo Grande,” directed by Sophie Hyde, Thompson is emotionally wrought and physically naked, and not in a lowlight, sexy kind of way.Thompson plays Nancy, a recently widowed, former religious schoolteacher who has never had an orgasm. At once a devoted wife and a dutiful mother harboring volumes of regret for the life she didn’t live and the dull, needy children she raised, Nancy hires a sex worker — a much younger man played by relative newcomer Daryl McCormack (“Peaky Blinders”) — to bring her the pleasure she’s long craved. The audience gets to follow along as this very relatable woman — she could have been your teacher, your mother, you — who in Thompson’s words “has crossed every boundary she’s ever recognized in her life,” grapples with this monumental act of rebellion.“Yes, she’s made the most extraordinary decision to do something very unusual, brave and revolutionary,” Thompson said from her office in North London. “Then she makes at least two or three decisions not to do it. But she’s lucky because she has chosen someone who happens to be rather wise and instinctive, with an unusual level of insight into the human condition, and he understands her, what she’s going through, and is able gently to suggest that there might be a reason behind this.”Daryl McCormack and Thompson in “Good Luck to You, Leo Grande,” which the screenwriter Katy Brand wrote with the actress in mind.Searchlight PicturesThompson met the challenge with what she calls “a healthy terror.” She knew this character at a cellular level — same age, same background, same drive to do the right thing. “Just a little sliver of paper and chance separates me from her,” she quipped.Yet the role required her to reveal an emotional and physical level of vulnerability she wasn’t accustomed to. (To ready themselves for this intimate, sex-positive two-hander that primarily takes place in a hotel room, Thompson, McCormack and Hyde have said they spent one of their rehearsal days working in the nude.) Despite a four-decade career that has been lauded for both its quality and its irreverence and has earned her two Academy Awards, one for acting (“Howards End”) and one for writing (“Sense and Sensibility”), Thompson has appeared naked on camera only once: in the 1990 comedy “The Tall Guy,” opposite Jeff Goldblum.She said she wasn’t thin enough to command those types of skin-baring roles, and though for a while she tried conquering the dieting industrial complex, starving herself like all the other young women clamoring for parts on the big screen, soon enough she realized it was “absurd.”“It’s not fair to say, ‘No, I’m just this shape naturally.’ It’s dishonest and it makes other women feel like [expletive],” she said. “So if you want the world to change, and you want the iconography of the female body to change, then you better be part of the change. You better be different.”For “Leo Grande,” the choice to disrobe was hers, and though she made it with trepidation, Thompson said she believes “the film would not be the same without it.” Still, the moment she had to stand stark naked in front of a mirror with a serene, accepting look on her face, as the scene called for, was the most difficult thing she’s ever done.“To be truly honest, I will never ever be happy with my body. It will never happen,” she said. “I was brainwashed too early on. I cannot undo those neural pathways.”She can, however, talk about sex. Both the absurdities of it and the intricacies of female pleasure. “I can’t just have an orgasm. I need time. I need affection. You can’t just rush to the clitoris and flap at it and hope for the best. That’s not going to work, guys. They think if I touch this little button, she’s going to go off like a Catherine wheel, and it will be marvelous.”Several women have written screenplays for Thompson. That’s because “she always somehow feels like she’s on your side,” Brand said.Charlotte Hadden for The New York TimesThere is a moment in the movie when Nancy and Leo start dancing in the hotel room to “Always Alright” by Alabama Shakes. The two are meeting for a second time — an encounter that comes with a checklist of sexual acts Nancy is determined to plow through (pun intended). The dance is supposed to relieve all her type-A, organized-teacher stress that’s threatening to derail the session. Leo has his arms around her neck, and he’s swaying with his eyes closed when a look crosses Nancy’s face, one of gratitude and wistfulness coupled with a dash of concern.To the screenwriter, Katy Brand, who acted opposite Thompson in the second “Nanny McPhee” movie and who imagined Thompson as Nancy while writing the first draft, that look is the point of the whole movie.“It’s just everything,” Brand said. “She feels her lost youth and the sort of organic, natural sexual development she might have had, if she hadn’t met her husband. There is a tingling sense, too, not only of what might have been but what could be from now on.”Brand is not the first young woman to pen a script specifically for Thompson. Mindy Kaling did it for her on “Late Night,” attesting that she had loved Thompson since she was 11. The writer Jemima Khan told Thompson that she had always wanted the actress to be her mother, so she wrote her a role in the upcoming film “What’s Love Got to Do With It?”“I think the thing that Emma gives everybody and what she does in person to people, and also via the screen, is that she always somehow feels like she’s on your side,” Brand said. “And I think people really respond to that. She will meet you at a very human level.”The producer Lindsay Doran has known Thompson for decades. Doran hired her to write “Sense and Sensibility” after watching her short-lived BBC television show “Thompson” that she wrote and starred in. The two collaborated on the “Nanny McPhee” movies, and are working on the musical version, with Thompson handling the book and co-writing the songs with Gary Clark (“Sing Street”).Thompson in “Nanny McPhee Returns.” She’s at work on a musical version of the franchise.Liam Daniel/Universal PicturesTo the producer, the film is the encapsulation of a writer really understanding her actress.“It felt to me like Katy knew the instrument, and she knew what the instrument was capable of within a few seconds,” Doran said. “It isn’t just, over here I’m going to be dramatic. And over here, I’m going to be funny, and over here I’m going to be emotional. It can all go over her face so quickly, and you can literally say there’s this feeling, there’s this emotion.”Reviewing “Leo Grande,” for The New York Times, Lisa Kennedy called Thompson “terrifically agile with the script’s zingers and revelations,” while Harper’s Bazaar said Thompson was “an ageless treasure urgently overdue for her next Oscar nomination.”The obvious trajectory for a film like this should be an awards circuit jaunt that would probably result in Thompson nabbing her fifth Oscar nomination. But the film, set to debut on Hulu on Friday, will not have a theatrical release in the United States.Thompson doesn’t mind. “​​It is a small film with no guns in it, so I don’t know how many people in America would actually want to come see it,” she said with a wink.That may be true. But more consequently, because of a rule change by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences that reverts to prepandemic requirement of a seven-day theatrical release, “Good Luck to You, Leo Grande” is not eligible for Oscar consideration, a reality that the director Sophie Hyde is not pleased with.“It’s really disappointing,” Hyde said. “I understand the desire to sort of protect cinema, but I also think the world has changed so much. Last year, a streaming film won best picture.” She argued that her film and others on streaming services aren’t made for TV. They are cinematic, she said, adding, “That’s what the academy should be protecting, not what screen it’s on.”Thompson, for one, seems rather sanguine about the whole matter. “I think that, given the fact that you might have a slightly more puritanical undercurrent to life where you are, that it might be easier for people to share something as intimate as this at home and then be able to turn it off and make themselves a nice cup of really bad tea,” said Thompson, laughing. “None of you Americans can make good tea.” More

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      in Movies

      ‘Fatal Attraction’ and the Disappearance of Erotic Thrillers

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      Elyssa Dudley and Listen and follow Still ProcessingApple Podcasts | Spotify | Stitcher | Amazon Music“Fatal Attraction” came out when Wesley Morris was 11, and it’s made a permanent impression on the way he thinks about certain aspects of lust and suspense. “There’s a lot wrong with this movie, and yet — and yet! — it’s such a good movie,” he said. Wesley invited Parul Sehgal, a staff writer at The New Yorker, to discuss the movie, starring Glenn Close and Michael Douglas.Both Wesley and Parul watched “Fatal Attraction” over and over as preteens, and they’ve rewatched it multiple times since. “Every time I see this movie, I identify with a different character,” Parul said. “I have a different sense of what this movie is about.”As Wesley and Parul break down the most powerful scenes, they are reminded of the loss of high-stakes sex onscreen today. They discuss why the erotic thriller genre has disappeared — and what they could gain from seeing more genuine, grown-up sex in movies.Michael Douglas and Glenn Close star in “Fatal Attraction,” directed by Adrian Lyne.Ullstein Bild via Getty ImagesHosted by: Wesley Morris and Jenna WorthamProduced by: Elyssa Dudley and Hans BuetowEdited by: Sara Sarasohn and Sasha WeissEngineered by: Marion LozanoExecutive Producer, Shows: Wendy Dorr More

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      Why I Love Erotic Thrillers

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      They are best consumed as escapist fantasies about a mythic figure I myself could never embody: the femme fatale.I can trace my fascination with erotic thrillers back to the 1998 Neve Campbell and Denise Richards vehicle “Wild Things.” My father and I watched it together at his suggestion (there was never much censorship in my bohemian Manhattan childhood home), and as a burgeoning teen cinephile I was enchanted by its polished, artful sleaze. The plot concerns Campbell (brunette, surly, poor) and Richards (blonde, popular, wealthy), who accuse their high-school guidance counselor of abuse. Soon, the story becomes a thicket of convoluted double crosses, and nothing is what it originally seemed. By the time the end credits rolled and revealed Campbell as the film’s criminal mastermind, I was ready to cheer. Like many of the most captivating women in these films, Campbell’s character is an outsider who uses others’ underestimation of her abilities to her advantage. Fooled by her lower-class status, her enemies think she lacks savvy, but she is in fact a cunning strategist who uses her sexuality to outwit them.In other words, she’s a femme fatale — a trope that goes back over half a century. Noirs like “Double Indemnity” and “The Postman Always Rings Twice” established her as an archetype in the mid-20th century, but the erotic thrillers of the ’80s and ’90s made explicit her wielding of sexuality as a tool for getting what she wants. Whether she’s in an old-school hard-boiled detective story or an early-’90s erotic thriller, the femme fatale is a magician, fooling the men onscreen and the audience alike.It’s easy to write off erotic thrillers as sexist schlock — which they might be — but there’s more to them than meets the eye.The erotic thriller came to prominence in the prosperous Reagan era, which was politically conservative yet culturally trashy. These films fruitfully explored this contradiction, and by the ’90s, they were certified box-office gold. They distilled the excesses and anxieties of yuppie culture into psychosexually messy yet stylized commercial products, before fizzling out in the aughts. Building on the moody, femme-fatale-filled world of classic ’40s and ’50s film noir, the erotic thriller was always gloriously excessive, with a laser-sharp focus on beautiful women doing bad things. In films like “Basic Instinct,” “Fatal Attraction,” “Body Heat” and “The Last Seduction,” the calculated performance of self-assured femininity inspires fear, arousal and awe in equal measure.It’s easy to write off erotic thrillers as sexist schlock — which they might be — but there’s more to them than meets the eye. Consider the spaces of lurid glamour in which they unfold: gaudy dens of iniquity shot in chiaroscuro lighting, filled with dense cigarette smoke and revelers enjoying cocaine as if it were Champagne. These are images of hyperbolic sensuality where pleasure approaches vulgarity. The femme fatale’s acts of deception mirror these environments, presenting images of desire in a way that’s as likely to make us feel queasy as aroused (in “Fatal Attraction,” for example, Glenn Close’s character boils a pet bunny to exact vengeance on a lover who has spurned her). In this context, the sexually frank crime novelist and murder suspect Catherine Tramell from “Basic Instinct” (played by Sharon Stone) is an immoral figure whose self-possession and allure make for exciting viewing precisely because she is immoral, and whose qualities I nevertheless desire for myself.In these spaces of questionable morality, the femme fatale’s sex appeal gives her the upper hand. She’s always a target in rooms filled with men who want to leer at her. She knows this, and turns it to her advantage. While the erotic thrills are obviously meant to be found in her self-revelation, what seems more thrilling to me is how she works this trap. She’s a magician who can misdirect her audience with a quip and the raise of a perfectly sculpted brow. A femme fatale always knows how to use the erotics of the erotic thriller. When Catherine Tramell intimidates her male interrogators with candid discussion of her sex life and famously uncrosses her legs to reveal she’s not wearing underwear, the moment is so self-conscious in its studied sexiness that it becomes bizarre. Who would ever do such a thing in real life? But the men onscreen are so enthralled by her that she can do whatever she wants. It’s a fantasy of weaponized femininity in a misogynist world, and by the time Jeanne Tripplehorn exclaims of Stone’s character: “She’s evil! She’s brilliant!” I can’t help but wish that I too could be evil and brilliant, working my way into spaces where I shouldn’t be and surprising everyone with that stylish mix of sexiness and cunning that only exists in movies.For me, erotic thrillers are best consumed as escapist fantasies about a mythic figure I myself could never embody: I’m too neurotic to pull off acts of deception, to say nothing of murder, and I’m simply too lazy to commit to looking glamorous every day. Like many women, I say, “I’m sorry” too often, and one thing the femme fatale absolutely never does is apologize.But while I may sometimes wish for a femme fatale’s enviable style and mastery of seduction, I also realize she’s a trope that was largely written by men as an embodiment of fears around powerful women. The erotic thriller’s femme fatale can fit into any number of sexist tropes: She can be a teenage temptress, a home-wrecker, a sexy psycho. The creature of a period that cherished capitalist calculation and the pantsuit, she’s the nightmare version of a strong woman. I cringe at her while recognizing that I’m drawn to her. The thrills she and these films present are not merely sexual. She seduces some viewers — at least this one — into interrogating their assumptions about what a strong femininity can look like.Abbey Bender is a writer whose work has appeared in The Washington Post, Sight & Sound and Artforum. More

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      Erika Lust's Alternative Porn Vision

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      The Swedish moviemaker thinks pornography can create a society that sees sexuality as myriad and joyful, and where women’s pleasure matters.BARCELONA, Spain — When Billie Eilish called pornography “a disgrace” in a recent radio interview, the quote made headlines. The Grammy-winning musician said she had started watching at around age 11, to learn how to have sex, and that she was now angry about the way she felt porn misrepresented women.When people talk about pornography, they’re often referring, like Eilish, to its commercial, heterosexual variety, which is what most of the free porn online tends to be. On those sites, you’d be forgiven for thinking it all looks the same. But depending on the sexual politics and vision of its creator, porn can look wildly different.Take, for example, the work of the Swedish filmmaker Erika Lust. She has built her production company, Erika Lust Films, into an art-house pornography behemoth by offering something outside the porn mainstream. Most viewers watch Lust’s stylish, highly produced films by subscribing to her websites, where she also distributes videos by other like-minded directors. But her own films have also been screened in regular movie theaters in Berlin, London, Paris, Los Angeles and New York.“There’s not just one type of porn,” Lust said in an interview at her office in Barcelona, where she has lived since 2000. “People see it as one monolithic entity, but it’s not.”In the films Lust makes, she said her goal was for the female performers to have real orgasms. “When women watch porn, they need to see that women are being stimulated,” she said. “If there is a scene with penetrative sex, viewers need to see a woman using her hand or a vibrator at the same time — because that’s what works for most women.”Lust, 44, added that she had spoken with many young women who told her, “‘Something’s wrong with my body, I can’t reach an orgasm with a man,’ because they’re reproducing what they learn from online porn.”In Eilish’s radio interview, she said that the damage inflicted on her by online pornography went deeper still: In her view, it had “destroyed” her brain. The philosopher Amia Srinivasan has also recently considered porn’s effect on the mind, reviving feminist debates from the 1970s and ’80s.In “The Right to Sex,” Srinivasan’s 2021 best-selling essay collection, she argues that, “While filmed sex seemingly opens up a world of sexual possibility, all too often it shuts down the sexual imagination, making it weak, dependent, lazy, codified. The sexual imagination is transformed into a mimesis-machine, incapable of generating its own novelty.” (Srinivasan declined to be interviewed for this article.)Although in her book she argues against censoring explicit material — a move that often unfairly targets women and sexual minorities, she writes — the Oxford University academic advises young people to lay off porn if they want their sex lives to be “more joyful, more equal, freer.”“Perhaps then the sexual imagination could be coaxed, even briefly, to recall its lost power,” Srinivasan writes.“Sex is such a huge part of who we are,” Lust said, “and there are so many more stories to tell.”Monica FiguerasYet Lust said it was film’s capacity to excite the erotic imagination that first drew her to pornography. While studying political science at Lund University in Sweden, she said she read “Hard Core,” a book by Linda Williams that is regarded as a classic of feminist film criticism, and that argues that pornography is a way of communicating ideas about gender and sex.Feminist thinking led Lust to realize that porn, like many other cultural products, was mostly made by men, for men and from a narrow perspective: that of “middle-aged, heterosexual, white men,” she said. This male view of sexuality was “often misogynistic, in which women were reduced to tools for men’s orgasm,” she added. A lot of commercial porn is shot from a disembodied male perspective, and often the only part of a male performer that’s visible onscreen is his penis, Lust said.The films she directs and produces, on the other hand, show women with sexual agency, who stimulate their own clitorises and whose facial expressions communicate their emotional and psychological states. Lust’s performers have a natural, everyday look and include people of “different sexualities, skin colors and body shapes,” she said.Her films are also heavy on plot lines. Lust’s best-known series, “XConfessions,” are filmed depictions of her viewers’ real fantasies. Anyone can “confess” their imagined or real-life sex stories through the XConfessions website. If she likes the idea, she turns it into a film. The stories include classic and kinky fantasies and are sometimes made by guest directors, such as the Canadian cult queer filmmaker Bruce LaBruce. One of his “XConfessions” movies, “Valentin, Pierre and Catalina,” is a remake of François Truffaut’s classic movie “Jules and Jim,” a three-way polyamorous love story between a woman and two men.LaBruce, who just wrapped up a feature-length parody porn movie for Lust set in the fashion industry, said in a phone interview that he was not surprised by the recent resurgence of negative attitudes toward porn. “The idea that porn is a male way of controlling women — that used to be the provenance of the Christian right,” he said. “Now, the left and the right have kind of flipped.”The anthropologist Gayle Rubin, who was on the “pro-sex” feminist side of the 1970s and ’80s “sex wars,” opposing calls for censorship, said by phone that pornography was “easy to pick on” because, historically, it had been marginalized socially and legally.“You know in movies when you think the monster is dead, but it just keeps coming back?” she said. “These assumptions about porn just keep resurfacing, going back more than four decades.“Many people just don’t think as rigorously about porn as they do other topics. Porn is a special case in how it’s treated intellectually, which is badly — even among philosophers and others who should know better,” Rubin said.While the porn industry is not known for critical reflection, there are, however, events like the Berlin Porn Film Festival, an annual gathering that seeks to provide new perspectives on the genre — artistic, social and even philosophical. Paulita Pappel, a porn performer and director who is one of the event’s curators, said that porn was often “a mirror of wider problems in society.” She added that, “The more we scapegoat and stigmatize it, the less space there will be for porn to be diverse, and the less chance we have to change the bigger issues.”When Lust screened her first feature-length movie, “The Intern,” to a sold-out audience at the festival in October, many in the audience — men, women and gender nonconforming people, mostly in their 20 and 30s — said that they came to see the film in search of an alternative to traditional porn.“I’m here because my friend recommended Erika Lust, because she doesn’t make heteronormative porn,” said Levent Ekemen, 28, a graduate student. “Her films show sensuality, and they’re extremely erotic.”Lust, center, on the set of “The Intern,” her first feature-length movie, which had its premiere at the Berlin Porn Film Festival in 2021.Adriana EskenaziLust said she hoped that the movies on her websites can have an “expansive” effect on people’s sense of the erotic. “With some of LaBruce’s films with male interaction,” she said, “men tell me, ‘Erika, I’ve never watched this before, but it was on your site, and it was hot!’ People are opening up their sexual visions outside of what they might be used to seeing.”She added that she wanted to help create a society that sees sexuality as myriad and joyful, and where women’s pleasure matters. “The value filmmaking has when it comes to empathizing with other people is incredible,” she said. “Sex is such a huge part of who we are, and there are so many more stories to tell.”“I have a right to tell them,” she added. “And no one can stop me.” More

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      in Theater

      ‘Romeo and Juliet’ Meets the Hot Vax Summer

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      A lusty new production is both an enticement and a warning as we tentatively explore intimacy after a year of forced solitude.What will be the idiom, in my modest estimation, to best define our relationship to sex during the Covid-19 pandemic? “Stay home if you sick, come over if you thicc” — so say the boys of Tinder.It’s not quite Shakespeare — or is it? I’m willing to bet that if they lived in 2021, Romeo and Juliet would quickly become fluent in our contemporary language of lust and seduction. After all, sex has always been an element of Shakespeare’s play, though portrayals of it have changed in productions over the last 400 years, depending on trends and cultural attitudes.So it would make sense, after the pandemic year we’ve had, that we’re in for a spate of sexy Shakespeare — frilly ruff and all. And “Romeo and Juliet” — including the lusty new filmed production that premiered last week on PBS — looks like it’ll be the play of this spicy summer to come.I’ve already encountered other renditions in the last couple of weeks: the Public Theater’s bilingual “Romeo y Julieta,” the Actors Theater of Louisville’s “Romeo & Juliet: Louisville 2020.” An interactive production is forthcoming from England’s Creation Theater.Though a play about intimacy, yearning and death feels right for the moment, I have to admit my discomfort with all those honeyed kisses and sweet nothings: The pandemic has left me unprepared for lovers meeting at any distance closer than six feet.The sexiness of “Romeo and Juliet” depends not just on a director but on the temperature of the times, whether the drafty climate of a chaste family dinner with Granny or the febrile blaze of a Friday night date set to a playlist of ’90s R&B jams.Though the Elizabethans of Shakespeare’s time were down for lewd wordplay and suggestive winks in the text, stage depictions of physical intimacy were a step too far. The Victorians? Stuffier than a mouth breather during allergy season, they tended to shift the story toward innocent love rather than lust.Romeo and Juliet got a movie makeover in the 1960s, however, when the director Franco Zeffirelli premiered his sensual adaptation, including a famous nude love scene, during the peak of the sexual revolution.And if you had a pulse in the ’90s you caught Leonardo DiCaprio and Claire Danes in Baz Luhrmann’s wistfully romantic “Romeo and Juliet,” which seemed charged by the melancholic sighs of disenchanted youth — appropriate for the decade of irony and grunge.Orlando Bloom, left, and Condola Rashad in the 2013 Broadway production of “Romeo and Juliet.”Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesWhich presents the question of where we are now. (The dull and curiously sexless 2013 Broadway production, starring Orlando Bloom and Condola Rashad, had little to add.) Have dating apps and the sex-positive and body-positive movements brought us to a new age of uninhibitedness?Honestly, I’m not sure. Many of our austere cultural standards around sex, cuffed to religious conventions, economics and antiquated notions about gender, still haunt us behind closed doors — even as much of our media uses sex as consumer currency. But a pandemic that made isolation the rule surely has changed our relationship to physical intimacy.That — not personal prudishness or naïveté — is why too sexy of a “Romeo and Juliet,” like the new filmed edition starring Jessie Buckley and Josh O’Connor, leaves me scandalized, as though I didn’t grow up in a household with HBO.The fabric of the film feels cut from the central couple’s marital bedsheets — the intimacy is that palpable. Scene after scene feels like it’s taking place by candlelight. The hovering camerawork peeks over shoulders to catch a kiss or embrace.Cutting many of the play’s crass euphemisms (including the nurse’s many opinions on matters of the heart and, well, other parts of the body), this “Romeo and Juliet” builds from the physical tension among the characters.They tease one another, as Mercutio does Romeo and Benvolio in his Queen Mab’s speech; then he draws in Benvolio (depicted here as his lover) for a single electric moment before promptly shoving him away.Simon Godwin’s direction is tactile, obsessed with hands and the ways an open-palmed welcome, a single-finger caress, the taut-knuckled hardness of a fist can signify romance, or violence, or both.The confidential meeting of the lovers in the tussle of bodies at the Capulet shindig, the hesitant first touch of their fingers and, later, the urgent consummation — none of this is surprising. Neither is it risqué.And yet, to me, it felt alarming — pornographic even — given how we have spent the last year painfully aware of what threats proximity could breed.Last spring NYC Health released a much-mocked guide to safe sex during the pandemic, encouraging masturbation as the most Covid-friendly alternative to, in Shakespearean terms, sheathing one’s dagger. No more sweaty tangling of limbs in a dark bar, no more post-date kiss on the sidewalk outside a restaurant. Or at least not without risk.Even as more of us get vaccinated, intimacy will likely feel like a fresh adventure, for good and for bad. Some singles are emerging from their quarantine bubbles anticipating a “hot vax summer” of horny hookups and experimental exploits. Others are circumspect, our social skills atrophied and our inhibitions increased in response to a lethal disease.For the next several months, as we recover from a kind of intimacy-deprived PTSD, Shakespeare’s sexiest play — a play that links lust to violence, even death — may read as extreme, even subtly subversive.That’s the magic of the Bard, isn’t it? Racy enough for reprobates and rakes, or priggishly read by a congregation of stately stiff-backs, the work is spacious enough to accommodate any disposition. I might be too shy to subscribe to Romeo and Juliet’s steamy OnlyFans, but, hey, there are plenty out there who aren’t. More