The actress stars as a repressed widow who hires a sex worker to help her discover what all the fuss over orgasms is about in director Sophie Hyde's comedy-drama.
BY LESLIE FELPERIN
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JANUARY 22, 2022 5:45PM
Good Luck to You, Leo Grande
Good Luck to You, Leo Grande COURTESY OF SUNDANCE INSTITUTE/NICK WALL
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Intimate in every sense, Good Luck to You, Leo Grande represents an affirming, immensely likable British comedy-drama. Admittedly, it’s more issue- than character-driven, like a hip advice-column story but with tracking shots. But that didacticism works given that it features Emma Thompson as a prim, widowed, high-school religious studies teacher who hires Daryl McCormack’s sex worker for a date, hoping to have an orgasm for the first time ever.
Naturally, the course of true pleasure n’er runs smooth, but along the way this lean, sensitively performed two-hander, written by British comedian Katy Brand and directed by Australian Sophie Hyde (Animals, 52 Tuesdays), builds up a refreshingly sex-positive portrait of a client-escort relationship, but with a female customer for a change. Although older female viewers would seem to be Leo‘s obvious target, other demographics would also get into its groove. Theatrical returns might be modest, but online it will gush streams like a river in springtime.
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Good Luck to You, Leo Grande
THE BOTTOM LINE
Sex-positive and positively sexy.
Venue: Sundance Film Festival (Premieres)
Cast: Daryl McCormack, Emma Thompson, Isabella Laughland
Director: Sophie Hyde
Screenwriter: Katy Brand
1 hour 37 minutes
Although shot in a just-glimpsed Norwich, Norfolk, about a hundred miles from London, the town isn’t named and the story could be taking place in just about any hotel room in the U.K., or at least in any town big enough to have male escorts working discreetly in the area. In fact, the action is so confined to one location, you would almost think Brand had written this as a stage play originally. (Indeed, if this works as a film feature, maybe it will transition as a theater work someday.)
In a plush but anonymous hotel suite with a nice city view and a fully stocked mini bar, Dublin-accented escort Leo Grande (McCormack, from Peaky Blinders) arrives to meet Nancy Stokes. (She is played by Thompson, who, although she’s always worked quite steadily, is having a bit of a moment lately on screen with meatier than usual roles, for example in Late Night or the superb six-part BBC/HBO series Years & Years.)
Nancy lost her husband two years ago, and he was the only man she’d ever had sex with. Now she wants some professional help to see if she can finally experience a real orgasm, having always faked it. Moreover, she’d like to try some other kinds of sex (oral, both giving and receiving, and then both at the same time) and positions (doggy?) that her late husband was never interested in attempting and she was too shy to insist on.
