Someone asked the other day why we don’t cover the Berlin Film Festival, and in fact we do, but this year so far there hadn’t been any familiar faces. The universe clearly felt a tingle in its spine, because we promptly got a dash of Juliette Binoche, and now, a welcome dose of Emma Thompson doing what Emma Thompson does best: being Emma Freaking Thompson. Emma is at the Berlinale to promote Good Luck To You, Leo Grande, a movie in which she plays a retired widow who hires a sex worker to show her a little romance and excitement after the end of her boring marriage. (The actor playing Leo is enough of a newcomer that his Wikipedia page practically leads with “almost cast in The Force Awakens.”) The movie is getting a fair bit of press because apparently Emma appears fully nude in it, for the first time in her career**, and has a lot to say about how hard it is for women to shake the baked-in, dysfunctional relationships we’ve been taught to have with our bodies. But it’s also an artsy two-hander that’ll let us watch Emma Thompson do something, anything, and I need that almost as badly as I needed these photos of her being delightful on the red carpet.
**I thought she’d said it was the first time, period, but apparently she was being more specific — it’s the first time she was fully nude in front of a mirror staring at herself on film. Which IS indeed very specific.
