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Good Luck to You, Leo Grande – Emma Thompson hires sex worker in charming comedy
Thompson gives an emotionally generous performance as a former teacher seeking sexual gratification in an amusing and compassionate two-hander
E mma Thompson gives us a very personal, emotionally generous and intimate performance in this entertaining theatrical two-hander from screenwriter Katy Brand and director Sophie Hyde. Despite some moments of sentimentality and naivety, it is really watchable and conceived with a flair for commanding the audience’s attention. It’s not exactly right to call it a crowd-pleaser, but Brand – who has her own record in comedy writing and performance – has a comic’s sense of how and where to elicit an audience response.
Thompson plays Nancy, a middle-aged widow and former RE teacher who after a lifetime of unsatisfying conjugal relations with just the one man (her late husband) has decided to pay for discreet afternoon sex in an upmarket hotel room. With her brisk and schoolteacherly need for education and self-betterment, Nancy feels that she needs to experience some more sex before her death, including the most important and climactic sexual experience of all. Thompson makes her a cousin of sorts to the woman who secretly cries in the bathroom in Love Actually, because Alan Rickman is cheating on her, and to the nurse who had sex with Jeff Goldblum in The Tall Guy. Daryl McCormack (Isaiah Jesus from TV’s Peaky Blinders), enigmatically plays the young man she has hired online who goes by “Leo Grande”. Until relatively recently, “escort” was the term used if you wanted to avoid the p-word, but Leo, of course, with unselfconsciously polite professionalism, uses “sex worker”.
Leo has the tolerant, smilingly indulgent manner of a therapist who has seen and heard it all, or a concierge in a cool boutique hotel who can procure anything you like as Nancy babblingly confesses to him her unhappiness, her disappointment with her children and with herself, and her one frustrated moment of sexual rapture on holiday in Greece when she was 20. She is torn between delaying or abandoning this whole absurd idea and the need to get on with the sex right now (“I can’t bear the suspense!”) And, in fact, the audience might share that impatience, as it is the depiction of bought sex itself which is going to test this movie, rather than lines of bittersweet dialogue.
As for Leo, Nancy says: “You’re some sort of sex saint – are you real?” And again, we might well wonder the same thing. Just as the customer in the bought sex transaction is the one with the power and the capital, so Thompson’s character is the one with the wealth of backstory, and Leo sometimes seems blank, almost like a Stepfordian robot. We are waiting for Leo’s serenely trouble-free manner to crack, and of course crack it does, but the film refuses the traditional explanatory revelation of unhappiness, and shows us that some people selling sex can and do remain happy.
The movie is at its strongest in showing us the eerie process of Nancy losing her inhibitions as she gets to be Leo’s regular: not her sexual inhibitions, but her personal inhibitions. Thompson shows how her miserable need to abase herself before Leo, her confessional wretchedness, evaporates as her bossy, conceited teacherly mannerisms rise to the surface. She becomes more confident and the unlovely reactionary side to her comes to the fore, allowing her id free rein – even declaring that what the younger generation needs is a good war to burn off all that excess energy.
Of course, the thought experiment can’t be avoided: what if this was a middle-aged man with a younger female sex worker? What if it was Bill Nighy on screen with a not-as-famous female star? It naturally wouldn’t be the same; the tone would shift away from comedy, but that is because the power relations of gender affect the bought-sex experience, as they affect every other kind of experience. Perhaps Good Luck to You, Leo Grande does not aspire to a piercingly profound analysis of sex and the human condition. It is, however, an amusing, compassionate and humane drama acted and directed with terrific panache.
Good Luck to You, Leo Grande screened at the Sundance film festival and is released on 17 June in cinemas.
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A movie like "Good Luck to You, Leo Grande," a two-hander taking place mostly in a single location, only works if the two actors are charming. Charm is a quality very difficult to define, or even describe, but you know it when you see it. Charm can't be pushed. Neither can chemistry. Without these hard-to-grasp yet essential qualities, "Good Luck to You, Leo Grande," about an uptight woman who hires a younger male sex worker, would have been a so-called sex-comedy, filled with pushed and inauthentic hi-jinx. Considering these factors, "Good Luck to You, Leo Grande" is extremely risky. Everything depends on the feel of the moment, the way the actors look at each other, or listen, or react. Directed by Sophie Hyde , with a script by Katy Brand , these risks more than pay off, and often in very unexpected ways.
Emma Thompson plays Nancy, retired and recently widowed, vividly unhappy, and at the limit of her ability to endure her own unhappiness. Completely breaking her strict patterns, she hires a sex worker named Leo ( Daryl McCormack ), whom she somehow found on the internet. She rents a posh hotel room, where he joins her. The film is broken up into four separate "meetings," and each meeting has its own flow and rhythm, with jagged edges, reprieves and pauses, beautiful and funny moments, as these strangers get to know each other in what is a transparently transactional relationship. Things don't happen in a linear way: emotions rarely do. Sex sure doesn't, especially not with someone as terrified as Nancy.
Leo is kind and open, funny and confident. Nancy is a mess, whip-sawing from self-hatred to over-sharing to near-hysteria to business-like statements, flung at him like a weapon. There are times when a totally inappropriate motherly vibe comes out of her, and she worries he's being trafficked, or that he feels demeaned by being there, or grossed out by her body. Leo meets her wherever she's at. It's part of his job, and he's very good at his job. Leo does not judge. Nancy tells him straight out that she's never had an orgasm, nor does she expect to, so he shouldn't even try. Leo doesn't push it, or reassure her that he'll make her come, no problem. Instead, he asks her questions about her experiences. She's probably never said any of it out loud before, and the words tumble out of her mouth.
What happens between them is, of course, sexual, but so much else is going on. Fascinating philosophical territory opens up, where things like intimacy, aging, and the importance of sexual pleasure, whether it's with yourself or with someone else, enter the room. There is a moment early on where Thompson, always amazing but at her best here, begins to weep. For her, sex is associated with disappointment and loss. She isn't going to untangle that in a two-hour session. It's not like Leo touches her and she melts instantly. Nancy thought she hired Leo to have some sex. She didn't realize the focus would be on pleasure, whatever form that pleasure takes. She has no idea what pleasure even means.
The structure of "Good Luck to You, Leo Grande" is simple, almost like a stage play, but the execution clearly took meticulous care. The hotel room is shot by cinematographer Bryan Mason as though it's a vast space with different rooms: sitting on the couch has a totally different feel than sitting on the bed, even though the areas are just three feet apart. There's nothing fussy or overdone in the film's look, nothing to distract. Human interaction is the main event here. McCormack is extraordinary as Leo, approaching the character with no condescension. He easily handles the more troubled aspects of Leo's life, the flickers of unease when Nancy starts pressing to know more about his "real life." Leo is not a cipher or a symbol. This is a testament to the script, but also to McCormack's performance.
It's a relief to see a film so frank about sex, and so open to sex's complexities, especially when so much of current cinema is sexless to a disheartening degree. "Leo Grande" cares about sex for older women, and not just sex, but the baggage associated with sex, and how that baggage robs us of joy and fulfillment. Also revelatory is the film's non-judgmental attitude towards sex work. I thought often of the haunting moment in " American Gigolo " when Julian ( Richard Gere ) leans against the wall, naked, and opens up about what he does and why:
"The other night, that night I met you at the hotel, I was with a woman. Somebody's mother. Her husband didn't care about her any more. This woman hadn't had an orgasm in maybe 10 years. It took me three hours to get her off. For a while there, I didn't think I was gonna be able to do it. When it was over, I felt like I'd done something, something worthwhile. Who else would've taken the time or cared enough to do it right?"
Julian's monologue is not just about pleasure. He leads with the woman's pain. Sex isn't just sex. It's healing and cathartic and just plain old fun, fun with no object other than it's fun to have fun. These are tough topics. "Leo Grande" has a light touch, and the dialogue is often hilarious, but depth is never sacrificed. There is a moment when Emma Thompson stares at her naked body in the mirror, probably for the first time. Physical nakedness is one thing. Emotional nakedness is another. "Good Luck to You, Leo Grande" has room for both.
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Sheila O'Malley
Sheila O'Malley received a BFA in Theatre from the University of Rhode Island and a Master's in Acting from the Actors Studio MFA Program. Read her answers to our Movie Love Questionnaire here .
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Good Luck to You, Leo Grande (2022)
Rated R for sexual content, graphic nudity and some language.
Emma Thompson as Nancy Stokes
Daryl McCormack as Leo Grande
Isabella Laughland as Becky Foster
- Sophie Hyde
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- Bryan Mason
- Stephen Rennicks
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‘Good Luck to You, Leo Grande’ Review: Pleasure Principles
Emma Thompson and Daryl McCormack bring knowing vulnerability to this amusing story of a foxy prostitute and the woman who hires him.
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By Lisa Kennedy
If “Good Luck to You, Leo Grande” were a book, it might make a fine choice for a tipsy book club evening. And although the film about an older woman hiring a male prostitute feels ever so briefly like an updated tease of romance-novel fantasies, as directed by Sophie Hyde and written by Katy Brand, “Leo Grande” proves to be a tart and tender probe into sex and intimacy, power dynamics and human connection.
The actors Emma Thompson and Daryl McCormack find and then build steadily on the appealing and complex chemistry of their characters as this two-hander unfolds in a mildly posh, yet nondescript hotel room. The film starts with the satiny handsome Leo walking down a street with greet-the-day ease; he’s a professional getting into character. He knocks on the door of a hotel room where Nancy Stokes awaits. She has secured his services, but is still nervous about that decision. Upon Leo’s arrival, Nancy begins nattering — a lot. She has cause to: She’s a retired schoolteacher and widow; and she’s never done anything remotely like this. And by “this” we mean take her own pleasure seriously.
Leo is a sex-positive, 20-something from Ireland. His familial ties are frayed, and Nancy tugs on those threads out of interest, out of guilt, but also to reassert control when she feels exposed. Issues of class figure into her judgments; but the movie feels oddly mum about race. (McCormack is biracial.)
While Nancy might not be limber enough for every sexual position on her check list (for which she dons reading glasses to consult), Thompson is terrifically agile with the script’s zingers and revelations. A relative newcomer, McCormack moves between wit, compassion and vulnerability with grace. In the most transactional sense, Nancy gets even better than what she paid for. Thanks to Thompson and McCormack’s delicate dance, so will audiences.
Good Luck to You, Leo Grande Rated R for sexual content, nudity and some blue language. Running time: 1 hour 37 minutes. Watch on Hulu.
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‘good luck to you, leo grande’ gives emma thompson a grand showcase.
Emma Thompson lays herself bare in the dramedy “Good Luck to You, Leo Grande,” but it’s the emotional aspects that deserve the most attention, in this funny and sensitively told two-hander that, understandably, is making its debut on Hulu. Taking place almost entirely inside a hotel room, it’s a movie bathed in poignance and sweetness as well as sex and longing.
Thompson’s Nancy (not her real name) is introduced during her first meeting with a sex worker played by Daryl McCormack, Leo Grande (not his real name either), as she apprehensively and clearly ambivalently seeks to avail herself of his services. While he calmly seeks to reassure her, her biography gradually spills out, including the death of her husband two years earlier, and her unsatisfying sex life with him throughout their lives.
A teacher by training, Nancy approaches the whole exercise with an almost clinical sense of curiosity that can be very, very funny, well aware of the absurdities of this arrangement, and ready to back out at a moment’s notice. She peppers Leo with questions about how it all works logistically, while pushing for personal details that he only grudgingly provides.
Written by Katy Brand and directed by Sophie Hyde, “Leo Grande” overcomes the claustrophobia of the premise and framing through the sheer quality of the performances, including McCormack, an Irish actor perhaps best known stateside for “Peaky Blinders.”
Still, Thompson provides the film’s emotional core, playing a woman in her mid-50s who says, “I want to play at feeling young again,” speaks openly about never having experienced an orgasm and expresses concern early on that by doing this she’s “just a seedy old pervert.”
“Leo Grande” could easily be jokey or overly sentimental, but the movie largely avoids those pitfalls. And those who dwell on the “body positivity” element, which is certainly a marketing hook, shouldn’t miss the underlying themes not only about accepting who you are but lamenting missed opportunities and roads not taken, which resonate in a very universal manner.
Having played at the Sundance Film Festival , the small scale of the project makes its arrival via Hulu understandable (it’s produced through a sister Disney entity, Searchlight Pictures), but one hopes Thompson’s work here isn’t overlooked or forgotten because of the understated nature of the material and the venue.
So good luck to you, indeed, “Leo Grande,” as well as to Nancy and Leo (again, not their real names).
“Good Luck to You, Leo Grande” premieres June 17 on Hulu.
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Good Luck to You, Leo Grande
2022, Comedy/Drama, 1h 37m
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Sexual awakening stories aren't in short supply, but Good Luck to You, Leo Grande proves you can still tell one with a refreshing -- and very funny -- spin. Read critic reviews
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- Rating: R (Some Language|Sexual Content|Graphic Nudity)
- Genre: Comedy, Drama
- Original Language: English (United Kingdom)
- Director: Sophie Hyde
- Producer: Debbie Gray , Adrian Politowski
- Writer: Katy Brand
- Release Date (Streaming): Jun 17, 2022
- Runtime: 1h 37m
- Sound Mix: Dolby Digital
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‘Good Luck to You, Leo Grande’ Review: Emma Thompson Gets in Touch With Her Sensual Side in a Gripping Two-Hander
Seduction is the focus of this riveting conversation piece in which Emma Thompson's buttoned-up teacher hires — and rejects — a male sex worker.
By Amy Nicholson
Amy Nicholson
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In the opening sequence of Sophie Hyde ’s riveting “Good Luck to You, Leo Grande,” a suave young man ( Daryl McCormack ) steps out of an ice cream parlor, catches a mint candy in his mouth, and swings around a street pole like a hipster Gene Kelly. The Irishman is confidently cool — and not quite himself. He’s getting into character as Leo Grande, a charming sex worker who sells the Leo Grande Fantasy: a “service,” he calls it, where he gives paying customers exactly what they need, be it physical release, conversation or, for one client, dressing like a cat. But Katy Brand’s screenplay is only focused on Leo’s interactions with one customer: Nancy ( Emma Thompson ), a widowed religious studies teacher pacing a blandly attractive hotel room, panicked that she’s made a mistake. What’s her fantasy, Leo asks. Nancy chokes on her own desires. “To have sex? Tonight? With you ? Do you mind ?”
The set-up of this intimate talkie sounds like middle-aged wish fulfillment — “How Teach Got Her Groove Back” — with Nancy checking off her handwritten list of erotic firsts courtesy of a kind and generous twenty-something she calls a “sexual saint.” (She even pinches Leo’s arm to prove he’s real.) But Hyde’s insight is that Leo isn’t real. He’s a performance, a put-on, an actor of sorts conscientiously projecting sensitivity and patience while nervous Nancy peppers him with questions. Does he feel demeaned? Does he use Viagra? Is he a trafficked orphan? What’s the oldest woman he’s had sex with? Why is he doing this? What does his mother think? The first three answers are no, no and no. The others, Leo parries with deflections, candor or lies. Like a therapist, he tries to figure out what response Nancy needs to hear. And he’s not always correct. When he suggests roleplaying sexy teacher and naughty student, Nancy gags.
Hyde’s film is a psychological conversation piece titillated by the potential of sex. (There isn’t much onscreen until it ends with a graphic montage that feels included to prove Thompson’s faith in the project.) Over Nancy and Leo’s sessions together, they fall into a pattern: He struggles to set the mood, and she smashes it. But while Thompson’s character does most of the talking, in the moments she excuses herself to hide in the bathroom, Bryan Mason’s camera prefers to stay with him. Leo lets his smile go slack. He studies himself in the mirror. And then when his client reemerges, he snaps back into character. Leo Grande is fake. But the work it takes to be Leo Grande is genuine.
Thompson’s neurotic is alternately sympathetic and aggravating. Her Nancy tips over into comedy — there’s a negligee gag that’s played for an easy laugh — and the score can get overly playful, as though it, too, is anxious to put the audience at ease. Yet, Nancy’s lust is never the joke. Thompson commits to revealing the full woman, quite literally. While the film finds it tragic that Nancy is so uncomfortable in her own skin, she’s also condescending to waiters, priggish about her female students’ mini-skirts, and ashamed of her own adult children — one for having too much fun, the other for not having enough. She’s unsatisfied by her entire life, and she’s in part to blame. And despite her snobbery, she’s also not rich enough to pay for Leo indefinitely. That adds to the tension when she presents him with a list of five positions she claims she’s eager to try and instructs him to get on with it, even though her body language says otherwise.
McCormack is fantastic in a role so subtle it could appear flatlined and phony if people aren’t paying attention. He’s forced to keep his voice as steady as a horse tamer; the energy flows through his eyes. His Leo stares at Nancy, absorbs her, and through his rapt attention silently tries to convince her that to him, in this moment, she’s the only woman in the world. Steve Fanagan’s sound design casts a similar spell. Once Leo enters the hotel, the film never leaves. We become hyper-aware of the sound of socks on carpet and hands rustling over shirt collars and hair. Leo and Nancy’s hotel room begins to feel like sacred ground. (Composer Stephen Rennicks isn’t above adding music that harkens to a religious choir). “There are nuns out there with more sexual experience than me,” Nancy quips. Yes, but here, pleasure is both sacred and practical, a wobbly balance that seduces the audience, too.
Reviewed at Rodeo Screening Room, Los Angeles, Jan. 18, 2022. In Sundance Film Festival (Premieres). Running time: 97 MIN.
- Production: (U.K.) A Searchlight Pictures release of an Align presentation of a Genesius Pictures production. (World sales: Cornerstone, London.) Producers: Debbie Gray, Adrian Politowski. Executive producers: Katy Brand, Sophie Hyde, Alison Thompson, Mark Gooder, Julian Gleek, Martin Metz, Nessa McGill, Nadia Khamlichi.
- Crew: Director: Sophie Hyde. Screenplay: Katy Brand. Camera, editor: Bryan Mason. Music: Stephen Rennicks.
- With: Emma Thompson, Daryl McCormack.
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Good Luck to You, Leo Grande review: Emma Thompson finds more than sex in tender, taboo-breaking dramedy
Good Luck to You, Leo Grande (2022 movie)
Insisting that a film about hiring a male escort is actually about intimacy sounds like some kind of reverse Pretty Woman fantasy. And Good Luck to You, Leo Grande (on Hulu June 17) seems at first like it might be another, more familiar kind of movie: How Emma Got Her Groove Back . But Sophie Hyde's two-handed chamber piece turns out to be bolder and sweeter and less predictable than that: a tender coming-of-late-middle-age drama with a quietly radical idea of self-acceptance at its center.
Emma Thompson stars as Nancy Stokes, a sensible-looking widow who decides, after a passionless 31-year marriage, to finally find out what all the fuss is about by hiring a young Irishman who calls himself Leo Grande ( The Wheel of Time 's Daryl McCormack) to do the job professionally. When he shows up to her tastefully generic hotel room, Leo seems like the full package: a golden-skinned Adonis who gently deflects her steady stream of neuroses and breezily uses words like "empirically." (That last bit especially is catnip to Nancy, a retired teacher).
He may be an expert, but she makes it clear he shouldn't get his hopes up; she's gone a whole lifetime without an orgasm, and two hours with a handsome stranger won't change that. But she would like before she dies to feel the touch of a man who does things differently, which doesn't sound hard: For three decades, her late husband's lovemaking had all the intensity and eroticism of an oil change. To attempt to fix that, though, Leo will first have to break down an emotional wall so well constructed that even as he's trying to kiss her neck, Nancy can't seem to stop piling on the bricks.
If she didn't, there wouldn't be much of a movie. And the consummations that follow in several separate sessions happen tastefully off-screen, at least initially — secondary to the long, looping conversations that become their foreplay. She admits that she might not crazy about her grown son ("boring") and daughter (flighty, bohemian, always in a crisis); he allows her to grill him on his education and upbringing (his mother believes he works on an oil rig). But Hyde (who made 2020's great, underseen Animals ) and writer Katy Brand have a longer game in mind beyond Nancy's big O.
McCormack's Leo may be entirely too dreamy to believably be bookable by the hour (if a show like Bridgerton doesn't immediately pick him up, they're crazy), but he's remarkably winning in the role, bringing layers that belie his character's early, easy charm: when Nancy, drunk on her new empowerment, crosses a line, he reclaims his time with a hurt and fury that shocks her. And Thompson is, unsurprisingly, a force: alternately brittle and vulnerable and mordantly witty, her whole body vibrating with a lifetime's worth of sublimated desire. When she stands exposed and alone in front of a mirror in the movie's already-much-discussed final shot , it feels less like a prurient shock than it should, maybe, to see the two-time Oscar winner this way: Imagine the small miracle of allowing a 62-year-old woman to gaze at her full, unadulterated self on screen, and like what she sees. Grade: B+
Follow EW's ongoing coverage out of Sundance here.
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Good Luck to You, Leo Grande review: Emma Thompson hires a gigolo in this sweet, nuanced comedy
Screenwriter katy brand doesn’t settle for easy sentiment in this refreshing two-hander, article bookmarked.
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Dir: Sophie Hyde. Starring: Emma Thompson, Daryl McCormack, Isabella Laughland, Charlotte Ware, Carina Lopes. 15, 97 minutes.
“I want to do a blow job,” Emma Thompson ’s Nancy announces in Good Luck to You, Leo Grande . “Get that sorted.” She throws those words out as if she were reminding herself to get the oil changed in her car – mechanically, even a little irritably. Nancy’s husband died two years ago. He was the only man she’d ever had sex with, and none of it was particularly good. All of it missionary. She’s never had an orgasm, and doesn’t expect to anytime soon. But there’s a laundry list of sexual activities that she feels compelled to work through, as if they were obligatory steps to earning her womanhood badge. So she hires a sex worker, who calls himself Leo Grande.
When Leo ( Peaky Blinders ’s Daryl McCormack) describes Nigella Lawson as “sexy” without any deflating qualifiers (“…for her age”), Nancy’s taken aback. Who the hell is this guy? Which Jackie Collins novel did he and his perfect set of abs just step out of? Good Luck to You, Leo Grande could easily have been packaged up as the kind of feel-good feminist power anthem that privileges personal liberation above all. But screenwriter Katy Brand, a regular on the British comedy circuit, hasn’t settled for easy sentiment. Empowerment is only one piece of the puzzle, which together forms a refreshingly nuanced portrait of sex work, desire and self-perception.
Nancy, a retired religious education teacher, describes how she used to assign her pupils the essay question, “should sex work be made legal?” They’d always reply with the same thing: “Although the moral issues remain up for debate, the legalisation of sex work would ultimately provide protection for sex workers and help eradicate trafficking and abuse.” We’re led to believe Nancy shares that view.
But, though morally sound, there’s a certain emotional detachment to that answer. Sex work, even among the progressively minded, is still treated as something to be kept out of sight and out of mind. There’s crushingly little agency given to those who pursue it. And so Nancy, when faced with Leo’s easy confidence, immediately launches into a full-blown interrogation: is he an orphan? Has he been trafficked? When was the last time he saw his mother? Is she exploiting him? She demands Leo give up the veil of anonymity so essential to his work – both are using fake names, of course – purely to satisfy her own conscience.
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Sophie Hyde, whose 2019 directorial effort Animals tackled toxic friendships with equal savvy, makes the most of the film’s fixed location. We’re confined entirely to Nancy’s hotel room, minus a brief sojourn to a cafe and the hotel’s bar. The place is sterile but elegant, as mid-priced hotels tend to be. There’s nowhere, really, for these characters to run. Nothing, either, to distract them from the bare-faced truth of what’s brought them here.
Thompson has always done flummoxed like no other, and Good Luck to You, Leo Grande isn’t any different. But less expected from the actor is the harshness that creeps into her voice at certain moments. Who exactly is this woman outside this room? Beyond this conversation? We’re left to wonder. McCormack, meanwhile, does a sublime job of essentially playing two characters: the self-assured and chivalrous Leo Grande, and the man who lives behind him. We’re offered only the smallest of glimpses. “I made him and I’m proud of him,” he says of Leo. Hyde’s film is generous in that way – it understands that he deserves to feel good about himself just as much as Nancy does.
‘Good Luck to You, Leo Grande’ is in cinemas from Friday 17 June
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Good Luck to You, Leo Grande review - claustrophobic and bland | reviews, news & interviews
Good luck to you, leo grande review - claustrophobic and bland, a chamber piece set in the bedchamber depicts an older woman in search of sexual pleasure.
I really wanted to like Good Luck to You, Leo Grande. It’s got a funny trailer and Emma Thompson has been passionately publicising her film. And while our screens are currently full of stories about twentysomething girls and their chaotic love lives, watching a 62-year old woman intent on enjoying sex with a younger man on her own terms seemed promising. Unfortunately, the film is overly talky and visually dull.
Filmed under the restrictions of Covid, Leo Grande takes place almost entirely in a single hotel room, with one scene in the downstairs bar. It could have been a two-hander play, rather than a movie, and banal framing, lighting, and camerawork do nothing to help the claustrophobic blandness.
There’s also a problem with the casting. It may well have been impossible to get the script on to the screen without Thompson's star power, but her public image is so strong as an independent, sex positive feminist that it’s very hard to suspend disbelief and accept that she is the character she’s portraying. Nancy Stokes is a retired RE teacher who after two years of widowhood, decides to hire a sex worker to see if she can achieve the orgasm that her husband (the only man she has ever slept with) failed to provide during their long marriage.
These talkfests take up most of the film – in lieu of on-screen sex. We learn about Leo's fractured relationship with his Irish mum and military brother, but Nancy never asks her escort about his absent dad. Maybe because that would have led to questions that a cautious screenwriter didn't want to tackle. Why did Nancy specifically chose Leo from the agency’s roster of escorts? He is mixed race and it’s hard to believe that Nancy would not be aware of Prue Leith’s widely reported remarks or the TV documentary about white European geriatrics going to Gambia for sex with young black men. Nancy is so anxious about how she appears to Leo, so keen to find out his real name and history, it seems cowardly that a discussion of race, white privilege, and exploitation never arises.
Unfortunately, there’s also not much chemistry between the two leads. It’s all very British and the sedate sex scenes look like they have not only been guided by an intimacy co-ordinator but directed by her or him, too. McCormack’s Leo is unnervingly perfect: he's a shop window mannequin – one with exquisitely sculpted abs – brought to life.
Despite having a woman director, writer, and several female producers, the camera’s gaze is male – we see more of Nancy than we do of Leo. It’s been a while since I’ve watched American Gigolo , but I’m pretty sure Paul Schrader framed its sex worker (Richard Gere) in a way that would arouse a female audience more convincingly back in 1980. And while I admire Thompson’s brave moments of nudity and her earnest desire to raise the subject of older women’s sexual needs, I was more impressed (and convinced) by her peer Joanna Scanlan’s fearless nude performances in The Invisible Woman and After Love .
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Review: Emma Thompson gets (and gives) marvelous sex ed in ‘Good Luck to You, Leo Grande’
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The long, oddly charming title of “Good Luck to You, Leo Grande” is a line of dialogue spoken near the end of this not-too-long and thoroughly charming British comedy. Much earlier than that, however, you might find yourself expressing some version of the same sentiment. Leo Grande (Daryl McCormack) is a sex worker in his 20s, and while he’s had many clients of varying persuasions and proclivities, he has never encountered one quite like Nancy Stokes (Emma Thompson), the prim, anxious 55-year-old widow who’s booked him for a high-priced session. Leo will need more than luck to put nervous Nancy at ease; he’ll need every tool in his kit, the most impressive and dexterous of which may be his tongue.
No need to get your mind out of the gutter; this movie would prefer it stay there. And it knows that when it comes to sex, the tongue can be an instrument of both pleasure and persuasion. Leo has a way with words, a flair for language that endears him to Nancy, a retired high school teacher. And during most of the four separate appointments that make up Katy Brand’s script, Leo and Nancy are engaged in long bouts of verbal foreplay, sharing intimate secrets and navigating a raft of fears and insecurities (most but not all of them Nancy’s). You could say that Brand and director Sophie Hyde take their time getting to the good stuff, except that the talk is good stuff, full of erotic tension, playful humor and candid insight into the erogenous zones of the mind.
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“What’s your fantasy?” Leo asks Nancy during their first meeting in the comfortable-looking hotel room that serves as the film’s primary location. But Nancy, leaning hard on her experience as an educator (and also on Thompson’s skill at playing persnickety authority types), deals more in goals than fantasies. In one of the film’s funnier exchanges, she reads from a list of sex acts she wants to try out, like a waiter rattling off the nightly specials. You have to admire her directness. Having spent decades in a stable, unexciting, orgasm-free marriage, Nancy now wants to shed her inhibitions and satisfy her pent-up longings with a handsome, well-built young man like Leo.
Behind the joyful, nonjudgmental, totally uninhibited sex scenes of ‘Good Luck to You, Leo Grande’
Nude rehearsals, deep trust and ‘enthusiastic consent’ were all part of the process for stars Emma Thompson and Daryl McCormack and director Sophie Hyde.
Still, those inhibitions persist, along with all the assumptions and prejudices that come with a socially conservative middle-class English background. (Nancy used to teach religious studies, a calling that seems not to have exactly tamed her libido.) Thompson, skilled at both effrontery and anxiety, mines that tension brilliantly. Nancy knows what she wants and is terrified by how badly she wants it, and she spends much of the early going trying to talk herself out of it, fretting about how much older she is than Leo and how repelled he must be by her sags and wrinkles. But Leo, waving this nonsense aside, reminds her that there’s nothing abnormal, let alone shameful, about expressing something so basic as desire.
“Good Luck to You, Leo Grande” thus achieves both the intimacy of a chamber piece and the directness of a public service announcement, one aimed at promoting sex/body positivity and debunking retrograde attitudes about women’s pleasure and the nature of sex work. If that makes it sound stagy and even didactic — you could certainly imagine it working well as a play — well, the message is a worthy one, and all PSAs should be this pleasurable. At times you can see the gears of Brand’s script grinding away, the carefully engineered pivots from one point or revelation to the next. (The fourth act, in particular, leaves no point unaddressed.) But Hyde stages it all with an unfussy elegance that serves the material, and any lingering creakiness is dispelled by Thompson and McCormack, who always seem to be playing people rather than ideological mouthpieces.
Their dialogue builds up a suitably erotic rhythm; it’s all about give and take, back and forth, the satisfaction of curiosity, the delineation and occasional transgression of boundaries. Nancy, projecting her own moral reservations onto Leo, sometimes goes too far in interrogating him about his profession. Doesn’t he ever feel degraded? And if not, then why does he employ a false identity (Leo Grande, surprise surprise, isn’t his real name) and hide the truth about his work from his family? There’s some honesty in the movie’s acknowledgment that even transactional sex is never the simple, no-strings-attached affair its participants might like to think. Nancy, having shared at length about her dull job, duller marriage and disappointing kids, understandably wants to know more about the man she’s paying to sleep with.
We want to know more about Leo, too, and McCormack, an Irish actor known for his work on “Peaky Blinders,” suggests just the right levels of depth and mystery beneath the cute face and chiseled physique. But we want to know Nancy even more, and Thompson’s performance more than satisfies that curiosity. This is hardly the first time she’s had passionate onscreen sex (who could forget the exploding milk carton in “The Tall Guy” ?). Nor is it the first time she’s played a role conceived in opposition to the ageist, sexist status quo, as she did in the 2019 comedy “Late Night.” Still, she has seldom worn her intent as clearly as she does in what is already “Leo Grande’s” most talked-about scene, one that beautifully dismantles every film-industry assumption about which bodies, especially women’s bodies, warrant the camera’s attention.
Mainstream movies, as Thompson, Hyde, Brand and their collaborators know, have done more than their part to keep women in their place, treating the complexities of human sexuality as grounds for sniggering humor at best and censorship at worst. “Good Luck to You, Leo Grande” presents itself as a corrective, with an earnestness that verges on the Utopian; for all its low-key intimacy and emotional realism, this movie knows it’s selling a fantasy of its own. But it’s hard not to warm to that fantasy, or to embrace its still-rare vision of a woman learning to articulate and satisfy her most human impulses. It’s good for Nancy. And for us.
‘Good Luck to You, Leo Grande’
Rating: R, for sexual content, graphic nudity and some language Running time : 1 hour, 37 minutes Playing: Available June 17 on Hulu
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Justin Chang has been a film critic for the Los Angeles Times since 2016. He is the author of the book “FilmCraft: Editing” and serves as chair of the National Society of Film Critics and secretary of the Los Angeles Film Critics Assn.
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Good luck to you, leo grande.
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Sex, nudity, and empathy in profound, intimate drama.
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What Parents Need to Know
Parents need to know that Good Luck to You, Leo Grande is a two-character drama starring Emma Thompson and Daryl McCormack that tackles themes and subjects often considered taboo -- namely, that desire and pleasure are never anything to feel ashamed about. The film is a real celebration of self-confidence and the importance of loving your body, no matter its perceived flaws. The topic and act of sex take center stage, with brief full male nudity and more lingering female nudity. An extended, graphic sex montage includes moaning/orgasm and shows many different positions. There's also simulated masturbation and oral sex. The characters have many frank conversations about sex and sex work (both believe the latter should be legalized). The two characters are vulnerable, insecure, and learn a lot from each other, despite being very different. Language includes "f--k," "whore," and "slut," and the characters drink alcohol together.
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What's the Story?
GOOD LUCK TO YOU, LEO GRANDE follows Nancy Stokes ( Emma Thompson ), a widowed teacher/mother who had a very unsatisfying sex life with her late husband and decides that she wants to explore her sexuality and try something new. So she hires a handsome young escort named Leo Grande Daryl McCormack ). But what transpires isn't just a quick fling; rather, it's a connection between two people who have a lot to get off their chests.
Is It Any Good?
This drama was undoubtedly very inexpensive to make, but it's incredibly rich in the themes and messages it seeks to convey. Good Luck to You, Leo Grande feels play-like in its simple, single setting and two-character structure. While that could be an issue in other films, here it matters little, if at all, thanks to wonderful character development and strikingly impressive performances. Thompson gives one of the finest of her career: Nancy is a remarkable character, diving headfirst into themes and conversation points seldom seen in mainstream films (credit to writer Katy Brand for tackling it all, too!).
While the lead characters are certainly insecure, their gradual ability to learn to love themselves, who they are, and what they look like, is infectious, giving the movie an ultimately uplifting feel. And McCormack must be commended for going toe-to-toe with a legendary performer like Thompson and coming out with his head held high. Don't be surprised if you end up liking these two characters so much as the film progresses that you sort of hope they might meet up for another date soon, if only so we can enter their world one more time.
Talk to Your Kids About ...
Families can talk about how Good Luck to You, Leo Grande encourages viewers to learn to love themselves and their bodies. Is that something you've ever felt insecure about? Did watching this film help?
It's very rare to see female sexuality, particularly for women over 60, explored in mainstream cinema. Why do you think that is?
The movie's sex scenes and discussions about sex are quite graphic. How do you feel about having open, free dialogue about sex?
Characters debate topics related to sex work, including whether it should be legalized. What are your opinions on the subject?
How does Nancy and Leo's relationship show the importance of both communication and empathy ?
Movie Details
- On DVD or streaming : June 17, 2022
- Cast : Emma Thompson , Daryl McCormack
- Director : Sophie Hyde
- Studio : Searchlight Pictures
- Genre : Drama
- Character Strengths : Communication , Empathy
- Run time : 97 minutes
- MPAA rating : R
- MPAA explanation : sexual content, graphic nudity and some language
- Last updated : July 7, 2022
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Review: A winning charmer in ‘Good Luck to You, Leo Grande’
Film Review - Good Luck to You, Leo Grande
- Oops! Something went wrong. Please try again later. More content below
- Nancy Meyers
- Sophie Hyde
- Daryl McCormack
- Nancy Meyers American film director, producer and screenwriter
- Sophie Hyde Australian film producer, writer and director
- Daryl McCormack Irish actor
- Katy Brand English actress, comedian and writer
Female desire is not a topic that gets a lot of space in mainstream Hollywood movies. And the desire of women north of 45? Well, that’s been almost exclusively the province of Nancy Meyers, Meryl Streep and Diane Keaton. There have been others, sure, but it’s often either played for humor or scrubbed and sanitized of anything remotely carnal. Usually it’s some horrifyingly infantilized combination of both. It’s as though someone decided that audiences couldn’t possibly bear to watch a woman of menopause age acting or even feeling sexual and few have dared to challenge that notion.
That’s all to say that it is a small miracle that “ Good Luck to You, Leo Grande ,” a smart, nuanced and adamantly sex-positive film about a 55-year-old woman, exists. In the film, written by Katy Brand and directed by Sophie Hyde, Emma Thompson plays said woman. Nancy is a retired religion teacher and somewhat recent widow who hires a handsome young sex worker, the titular Leo Grande (Daryl McCormack), for a night.
We’re introduced to the characters, essentially the only ones in the film, in a perfect, dialogue-free sequence right before they meet. It tells you a lot about who they are and how they exist in the world, but not everything. There’s basically 90 minutes of wide-ranging conversations to follow that will help flesh out that whole conundrum.
Nancy arrives at the tasteful hotel room armed with a sensible overnight roller bag, wearing a modest pencil skirt, matching blazer and floral blouse (her negligée is, hilariously, a not so different floral print). She’s flustered and rumpled and nervous as she switches from her flats to heels and checks the minibar. Leo, meanwhile, is a picture of youthful confidence and effortlessly put-together, as though he’s just stepped out of an advertisement for a trendy eco-conscious clothing startup. Together they’re not much different: She starts questioning her choice, chalking it up to a fit of madness and wondering what it says about her. He, meanwhile, continues to be cool, calm, charming and armed with a perfect response to everything.
The main reason for this “fit of madness” is that Nancy has never had an orgasm. She doesn’t expect to get one from the session with Leo, but she’s found herself with a bit of freedom finally after following rules, both self and societally imposed, for her entire life and has a few things she’d like to do. Nancy is deeply unsatisfied with her life, her body, her grown children (one is too boring, one is too wild) and her marriage. Repressed isn’t the right word, but perhaps unfulfilled is.
She can’t quite see or appreciate how lucky she is to have found Leo, who is patient and clever and not easy to write off. This drives her a bit mad, too, having lived life according to a set of principles that she knows haven’t brought her happiness and are outdated but that she’s not quite ready to let go of yet. And she will at various points over the next 90 minutes sabotage things.
Leo, both as a person and a character, is self-consciously styled as a bit of a fantasy. He’s there to be whatever his clients need him to be. The film doesn’t go especially deep into the world of sex work, though there are some references to bad clients and how it can be more unsafe for women. It is, for the most part, a rose-colored glasses version of what it could be.
Thompson is truly better than ever and brings to life a complex and evolving person with humor, grace and a sharp edge. McCormack, meanwhile, is a star in the making. And together, the two are magnetic in this wonderfully adult film that is funny, sad, awkward, empowering and illuminating.
The truth is, you don’t really know what audiences want if you’re not giving them the option. “It’s Complicated” and “Something’s Gotta Give” made almost $500 million at the box office, after all. “Leo Grande,” in 2022, shouldn’t really be a revelation. And maybe it’s not, but I’m still celebrating.
“Good Luck to You, Leo Grande,” a Searchlight Pictures release on Hulu Friday, is rated R by the Motion Picture Association for “sexual content, graphic nudity and some language.” Running time: 97 minutes. Three and a half stars out of four.
MPA Definition of R: Restricted. Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian.
Follow AP Film Writer Lindsey Bahr on Twitter: www.twitter.com/ldbahr
Good Luck to You, Leo Grande
2022, 1h 37min - Drama , Comedy
Country: UK
"Good Luck to You, Leo Grande" — drama and comedy movie produced in UK and released in 2022. It has a great rating on IMDb: 7.2 stars out of 10. It is a feature-length film with a runtime of 1h 37min. "Good Luck to You, Leo Grande" is currently available for rent and to buy on Apple TV, YouTube Movies, Sky Store and CHILI Play. Click on a playlink to watch it now!
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Rent: 3.49 GBP | Buy: 5.99 GBP
Rent: 3.49 GBP | Buy: 7.99 GBP
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...endearing, bubbly and heartening...
Emma Thompson finds more than sex in tender, taboo-breaking dramedy.
...manages to keep one foot firmly on the floor of enjoyably progressive entertainment...
https://www.amazon.com/Good-Grande-Watch-Online-Streaming/dp/B0B4DYMG7K/
It is a modern-day Pretty Woman with the roles reversed yet better.
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Good Luck to You, Leo Grande
2022, 1h 37min - Drama , Comedy
Country: UK
"Good Luck to You, Leo Grande" — drama and comedy movie produced in UK and released in 2022. It has a great rating on IMDb: 7.2 stars out of 10. It is a feature-length film with a runtime of 1h 37min. "Good Luck to You, Leo Grande" is currently available to stream on Hulu. Click on a playlink to watch it now!
Where to Watch Good Luck to You, Leo Grande online
Subscription
Subscribe: 5.99 USD
Join more than 3 million users
using PlayPilot to find the best movies and shows on all streaming services!
...endearing, bubbly and heartening...
Emma Thompson finds more than sex in tender, taboo-breaking dramedy.
...manages to keep one foot firmly on the floor of enjoyably progressive entertainment...
https://www.amazon.com/Good-Grande-Watch-Online-Streaming/dp/B0B4DYMG7K/
It is a modern-day Pretty Woman with the roles reversed yet better.
Cast & Crew
Similar titles.
2022, Movie - Comedy, Drama
2022, Movie - Biography, Comedy, Drama
2018, Movie - Comedy, Drama
2021, Movie - Comedy, Drama, Romance
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Good Luck to You, Leo Grande
2022, 1h 37min - Drama , Comedy
Country: UK
"Good Luck to You, Leo Grande" — drama and comedy movie produced in UK and released in 2022. It has a great rating on IMDb: 7.2 stars out of 10. It is a feature-length film with a runtime of 1h 37min. "Good Luck to You, Leo Grande" is currently available to stream on Amazon Prime and for rent and to buy on Google Play. Click on a playlink to watch it now!
Where to Watch Good Luck to You, Leo Grande online
Subscription
Amazon Prime
Google play.
Rent: 4.99 CAD | Buy: 14.99 CAD
Join more than 3 million users
using PlayPilot to find the best movies and shows on all streaming services!
...endearing, bubbly and heartening...
Emma Thompson finds more than sex in tender, taboo-breaking dramedy.
...manages to keep one foot firmly on the floor of enjoyably progressive entertainment...
https://www.amazon.com/Good-Grande-Watch-Online-Streaming/dp/B0B4DYMG7K/
It is a modern-day Pretty Woman with the roles reversed yet better.
Cast & Crew
Similar titles.
2022, Movie - Drama, Comedy
2022, Movie - Drama, Comedy, Biography
2018, Movie - Drama, Comedy
2021, Movie - Drama, Comedy, Romance
2022, Movie - Drama, Comedy, Crime
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Emma thompson in ‘good luck to you, leo grande’: film review | sundance 2022.
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
Leslie Felperin
Contributing Film Critic
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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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Venue: Sundance Film Festival (Premieres) Cast: Daryl McCormack, Emma Thompson, Isabella Laughland Director: Sophie Hyde Screenwriter: Katy Brand
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.
Silkily confident Leo — who not only has the frictionless bedside manner of a Harley Street therapist but is also clearly intelligent and educated judging by his use of words like “empirically” — isn’t fazed by the prospect of meeting all those requests. Nor, he insists, does he need any little blue pills to help him perform since he insists he finds Nancy very attractive.
Excessively critical of her own body — like so many women, especially post-menopausal women — she refuses to believe him. And yet over the course of several meetings weeks apart, Nancy comes to accept him at his word and learn to enjoy not only Leo’s body but her own as well.
Viewers who might assume that this is heading in the direction of a gender-flipped Pretty Woman are in for a refreshing surprise. No — spoiler alert! — Leo and Nancy are not going to fall in love, but they are going to develop a bond and an abiding respect for one another. Breaking down Nancy’s (and, by extension, the audience’s) assumptions, Leo (and, by extension, the filmmakers, who interviewed real-life sex workers for research) concedes that sex work can be dangerous and that there is a dark side to the profession. But like many of his colleagues, Leo honestly enjoys what he does, and takes pride in his well-honed skills. Not only is he good with people and deeply empathic, he’s able to find something beautiful and arousing in any client, even an 82-year-old woman he discreetly tells Nancy about.
Nevertheless, as with any professional therapist, he has strict boundaries, and Nancy finds herself violating them when she does a bit of internet stalking and works out Leo’s real name. (Both of them admit early on that they’re using pseudonyms.) Furious, he leaves immediately but comes back only to look for his mislaid cellphone, giving Nancy a chance to apologize. Eventually, they trust each other enough to open up more, and Leo can explain why he’s estranged from his mother, who thinks he works on the North Sea oil rigs, while Nancy can rethink her own prejudices and past positions.
That the film has to work toward this kind of revelation in order to create a dramatic arc feels like a minor disservice to the professional relationship, one seldom explored honestly in film, that’s at the story’s core. One could imagine that the cast and filmmakers might have even considered going down a another route and showing Leo and Nancy having un-faked sex — a move not without precedent in arthouse film — although of course that would have made for a very different product.
Instead, every time Leo and Nancy finally finish talking and get down to business, the camera discreetly wanders away and leaves them to it. However, it’s clear from the subsequent dialogue how much these transactions have affected both of them, especially Nancy.
One crucial shot looks on as Nancy finally, finally ! has her first orgasm, and somehow Thompson manages to even flush red as if she’s not even acting. Minutes later she stands before a full length mirror, entirely naked and brightly lit enough to show every stretch mark and cellulite bump, and it’s possible she’s never looked sexier and more alluring in her whole career. Some viewers might find it a little hard to buy Thompson as a mousy, repressed schoolteacher in the film’s early reels, but by the end she’s so endearing she’s impossible to resist.
With his work cut out holding his own against such a force, McCormack holds his own very admirably. Indeed, the camera loves him, and the way director Hyde and her regular cinematographer-editor Bryan Mason film him, especially holding close on his always mobile and expressive face as he sits listening to Nancy, is a master class on how to shoot an actor in a way that captures their beauty but doesn’t objectify them. He may be the object of the title’s salutary sentence, but he’s definitely the joint subject of the film.
Full credits
Venue: Sundance Film Festival (Premieres)
Cast: Daryl McCormack, Emma Thompson, Isabella Laughland
Production companies: Genesius Pictures, Cornerstone Films, Align, Paterson James
Director: Sophie Hyde
Screenwriter: Katy Brand Producers: Debbie Gray, Adrian Politowski Executive producers: Katy Brand, Sophie Hyde, Alison Thompson, Mark Gooder, Julian Gleek, Martin Metz, Nessa McGill, Nadia Khamlichi Director of photography: Bryan Mason Production designer: Miren Maranon Costume designer: Sian Jenkins Editor: Bryan Mason Sound designer: Steve Fannagan Music: Stephen Rennicks Music supervisor: Gary Welch Casting: Amy Hubbard Sales: Cornerstone Films
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Good Luck to You, Leo Grande: the joy of paid sex
Emma Thompson stars in a touching celebration of an older woman’s erotic discovery.
By David Sexton
“I’m all for prostitution.” “Why?” “Because everybody wins. It doesn’t interest me personally, but I think it’s a good thing.” So says the French author Michel Houellebecq. So there’s sex work sorted out for you. It’s a good thing! Still not sure? Here comes Good Luck to You, Leo Grande to change your mind, ever so gently, in the politest of terms, within the most appealing parameters. It’s the most acceptable face of whoring, not just decorously English but positively Anglican in its piety. At the Sundance Film Festival, where it was so well received, it must have seemed quite exotic.
It’s a two-hander, set almost entirely in a hotel room. Emma Thompson, the national treasure, 63, plays Nancy Stokes, a prim and proper retired RE teacher, whose husband died two years ago. Although they managed to have two children, now grown up and averagely unsatisfactory, the couple’s sex life was always dismal, unrewarding for Nancy and perhaps for her late hubby too. She has never had an orgasm or any other sexual partner. Now she wants to find out what she’s been missing, not with a man of her own age either but a hot young one. So she’s booked a hotel room and splashed out on two hours with a sex worker.
Enter Leo Grande (Daryl McCormack, 29, Isaiah Jesus in Peaky Blinders ). She’s struck lucky! Or, more likely, being the careful type, has done her research. He’s perfect. Not just incredibly fit and handsome but ridiculously charming and nice too.
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Even though Nancy has got this far, she is still beset with doubts, anxiously asking him if he feels demeaned, while accusing herself. “I’m just a seedy old pervert. Just go! I feel like Rolf Harris all of a sudden.” “Rolf Harris?” says Leo, puzzled – as he also is when she tells him her marriage wasn’t a furnace of passion that burned itself out but more like the bottom drawer of an Aga. “A what?” he asks.
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Only when Nancy suddenly remembers the only time in her life she was ever aroused, when she was 20, on a family holiday in Greece and a waiter felt her up, does she melt. And then all goes well, clearly. At their second meeting , Nancy reads Leo a list: “1) I perform oral sex on you. 2) You on me. 3) A 69. 4) Me on top, 5) Doggy style.” “That sounds very achievable,” says Leo suavely. They begin to reveal their real lives to each other too.
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Good Luck to You, Leo Grande , so touchingly performed by Thompson and McCormack and sympathetically directed by Sophie Hyde, was written by the earnest comedian Katy Brand, a former evangelical Christian. A great Guardian favourite, she observed in that paper in 2014 that we are not very good at talking about sex in this country, but that comedians should try it and be prepared to take the consequences.
So here, in the course of celebrating female pleasure, is this almost inadvertent paean to sex workers – or, at least, certain sex workers, those working for women.
The positive message is underlined a little heavily at times. Nancy testifies that her body is no longer the carcass she has been heaving around for 30 years but “a thing of wonder, a playground of delight, as you say”. Leo, she says, is “some kind of sex saint” and his services should be available on the local council. Would a man in his 60s having a girl in her 20s supplied to him on the same rates seem quite such a good idea? The film doesn’t go there at all, its only concession coming when Nancy asks Leo if sex work isn’t more dangerous for women? “It can be,” Leo grants.
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Instead, the movie builds to an image that, as Woman’s Hour has noted, is bound to become iconic: Dame Emma’s first ever nude scene, looking at herself in a full length mirror with pleasure and acceptance at last, ready now to bid Leo farewell and good luck. Her posture deliberately recalls that of Lucas Cranach the Elder’s Eve in the Garden of Eden , Thompson says. As well as making this revolutionary display of an unglamorised, older woman’s body, she simultaneously strikes a blow for the full bush.
A lovely moment, and best understood, I think, as a riposte to another movie, tending the other way. In the popular fantasy Pretty Woman , 41-year-old mogul Richard Gere not only saves 23-year-old prostitute Julia Roberts but is saved by her. “Right after he climbed up the tower and rescued her, she rescued him.”
Pretty Woman ends with raucous celebration and a command to us all to follow suit – “This is Hollywood, so keep on dreaming!” The credits of Good Luck to You, Leo Grande just as proudly assert that it was “filmed entirely in Norwich”. That’s a retort too, I hope.
This article was originally published on 15 June 2022.
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This article appears in the 15 Jun 2022 issue of the New Statesman, The Big Slow Down
Good Luck to You, Leo Grande
2022, 1h 37min - Drama , Comedy
Country: UK
"Good Luck to You, Leo Grande" — drama and comedy movie produced in UK and released in 2022. It has a great rating on IMDb: 7.2 stars out of 10. It is a feature-length film with a runtime of 1h 37min. "Good Luck to You, Leo Grande" is currently available to stream on Hulu. Click on a playlink to watch it now!
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...endearing, bubbly and heartening...
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https://www.amazon.com/Good-Grande-Watch-Online-Streaming/dp/B0B4DYMG7K/
It is a modern-day Pretty Woman with the roles reversed yet better.
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‘Good Luck to You, Leo Grande’ Review: Emma Thompson Hires a Male Escort in Touching, Sex-Positive Two-Hander
A widowed schoolteacher hires a young sex worker (the excellent daryl mccormack) in a sweet chamber piece about modern intimacy..
David Ehrlich
Jan 22, 2022 9:00 pm
@davidehrlich
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“Good Luck to You, Leo Grande”
Editor’s note: This review was originally published at the 2022 Sundance Film Festival. Searchlight Pictures releases the film on Hulu on Friday, June 17.
Former schoolteacher Nancy Stokes ( Emma Thompson ) is about as comfortable with her sexuality as she is with the aging body that has been forced to suppress it her entire life. So when this recent widow splurges a chunk of her savings on a night in a hotel with London’s finest male escort — hoping that he might introduce her to the elusive orgasm that her late husband never bothered to look for, and that she’s always been too ashamed to find on her own — a part of her is naturally repulsed by how well things turn out.
Not only is the young man who comes to her room “aesthetically perfect,” Leo Grande (Daryl McCormack) is also clever, charming, and convincingly attracted to the post-menopausal prude who’s hired him for the evening. But what really gets under Nancy’s skin is that Leo seems to love his job. He isn’t dirty or desperate, nor is he doing sex work to put himself through school; on the contrary, he’s one of the most beautiful people who Nancy has ever seen in the flesh, he embraces his profession with the same ardor that he does his clients, and he articulates the virtues of giving pleasure with all the self-actualized calm of a wellness podcast.
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Nancy expected a human dildo who could give her an orgasm off the assembly line in exchange for her pity — someone repugnant enough to justify a lifetime of bad sex (with the same man) and a career spent chiding her students about the length of their skirts. What she gets is a warm and well-adjusted stranger who is more responsive to her needs than even she has ever allowed herself to be. And Nancy can’t help but resent Leo for that. While his flawless skin and Abercrombie model physique are agonizing enough on their own, it’s his confidence and compassion that send her over the edge; every flicker of pleasure that Leo gives her leaves Nancy more upset that so much of her life has been surrendered to shame.
Possibly the sweetest fairy tale about a sex worker this side of “Pretty Woman” — if much less retrograde, never quite as broad, and ultimately far more interested in interrogating the strictures of its fantasy — “Good Luck to You, Leo Grande” is a touching little two-hander that does right by its title character even if the lion’s share of the conflict in this audience-friendly charmer hinges on Nancy’s seesawing relationship with herself. Closed off one minute and yearning to be held the next, the film likewise teeters between the staccato iciness of Harold Pinter and the momcore joy of Nancy Meyers without fully surrendering to either one of them, a back-and-forth which produces its own kind of uneasy fun.
Of course, it’s all a bit hard to swallow at first. Not only is Leo enough of a people-pleasing dreamboat to make Jude Law’s Gigolo Joe seem like some Windows 95-era vaporware by comparison, but even Nancy is a shade too perfect in her self-deprecating nervousness. Unobtrusively directed by Sophie Hyde from a slim yet peppery script by Katy Brand (whose single-location piece was neither adapted from a play nor written with COVID restrictions in mind), “Good Luck to You, Leo Grande” never feigns neo-realism, but its banter tiptoes along the fine line between breaking the ice and breaking the spell. “A very fine vintage,” Leo smirks after watching Nancy pour a glass of wine. “It’s just from the minibar,” she responds, before realizing that her new friend isn’t talking about the drink.
Leo is pure fantasy, Nancy is a splash of cold water to the face, and they balance each other out so well that even the most natural moments between them can’t help but feel schematic. As they get to know each other across four rendezvous in the same hotel room, their respective masks will slip off, their roles will start to blur, and the film around them will become more affecting as a result.
If the getting-to-know-you phase is less nuanced than the later parts when Nancy and Leo effectively start cosplaying a gender-reversed “Closer,” the film’s two lead actors (in a cast of four) game out a lifetime of mystery in every shot. Thompson is unsurprisingly excellent as a woman whose sexual disappointments betray a deeper self-denial. Her Nancy is funny even when she has one foot halfway out the door, and as compelled by Leo’s body as she is confused by the wisdom he brings to it; both the film and Thompson’s performance are at their best whenever Nancy, a retired educator who’s awed by all that this young man is able to teach her, still insists that she knows better than him (“Sometimes I wonder if what you young men need is a war,” she offers in response to Leo’s overdeveloped self-understanding).
For his part, Leo turns out to be more than just the mellow pectoral dream guy he plays on the job, but the loveliness of McCormack’s potentially star-making performance is that he never lets his character feel like he’s lying, even when he’s eliding the truth. Leo isn’t shy about indulging his client’s dreams, but that doesn’t mean their time together is somehow illegitimate. While his name might be fake (and the backstory it covers up a bit threadbare), the intimacy he’s there to provide is real as can be, and the movie around him is able to withstand its more fantastical impulses because it strives to make those fantasies real as well.
The average sex worker may never be as beautiful as McCormack — the average movie star may never be as beautiful as McCormack — but a world that allows for pleasure and encourages people to share it with each other doesn’t feel so far out of reach. The only thing standing in the way is our shame, and while that isn’t as neatly conquerable in real life as it is on screen, it’s still encouraging when a nice morsel of a movie like “Good Luck to You, Leo Grande” proves totally unafraid of looking at itself in the mirror.
“Good Luck to You, Leo Grande” premiered at the 2022 Sundance Film Festival.
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This Article is related to: Film , Reviews and tagged Emma Thompson , Good Luck to You Leo Grande , Reviews , Sundance
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Good Luck to You, Leo Grande, image Courtesy of Sundance Institute
Good Luck To You, Leo Grande movie review: A delightful slice of pie
The 2022 Sundance Film Festival has been filled with far more misses than hits . Well, today, I will admit the tides have turned. I share my review of Good Luck to You, Leo Grande .
Nancy is a widowed woman who has never explored anything within her sexual desires. She was married to the same man for a long time. It was the same routine repeatedly, and he never had her in mind when it came to pleasure. Some would say he was a bit of a prude. However, Nancy wanted to feel satisfied for once in her life, and who could blame her?
When we meet Nancy Stokes (Emma Thompson), she is sitting down with Leo Grande (Daryl McCormack), who she just paid to have sex with. So naturally, she is freaking out because she’s never done something like this before and she’s got a million questions and even more things to say to attempt to delay the inevitable. No matter how hard she tried, he would always bring it back to why they were there.
Good Luck to You, Leo Grande is full of heart
One of the more fascinating things about the film is how delicate they treat the idea of an escort. We often see it displayed in films as this horrible thing and no matter how you feel about it, it shows the potential good in what it can bring to the table. It never crosses the prototypical line they do with this type of story.
We perform a 69, if that’s what it’s still called.
Another thing that stands out is Katy Bran’s writing about sex. Another thing that isn’t always painted in this delicate way shows the vulnerability and honesty surrounding it. Her writing shows the awkwardness, but the reality at the same time. I was thoroughly impressed by the number of layers within her writing in this script.
None of this would have worked without the performances. The topic being so delicate, as I mentioned, you have to have two actors willing to be vulnerable. Starting with Emma Thompson , who has had an incredible career. However, I’m not sure we’ve seen her as endearing as we did in this film. We watched an elderly lady who was scared and nervous become someone completely different. I loved how they showed no matter your age, you can change or differ your opinions on things. Thompson embodies this character to perfection and it’s a performance you won’t want to miss.
Where has Daryl McCormack been all of our lives? He handles the role of Leo with such poignant charm that it makes you love his character. Although a man of hire, Leo handled his job with grace in a way he made those who hired him feel things about themselves outside of the pleasure. McCormack is an absolute delight in this role and I hope this leads to more roles for him.
I loved the intimate setting director Sophie Hyde and the team presented. It’s in a hotel room for 95% of the film and we have a very strong script that is yet personal and how they utilized the setting to make the hotel room feel as important as the story was brilliant.
One of my biggest concerns is how this would end, because they could have gone so many different ways that would have been a letdown. But, instead, the final act wasn’t what I was expecting and that’s a good thing. I won’t go into much detail because I want you to watch this without knowing how things unfold.
Good Luck to You, Leo Grande is a delightful film with so much more heart than you can ever imagine.
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Review: A winning charmer in ‘Good Luck to You, Leo Grande’
Female desire is not a topic that gets a lot of space in mainstream Hollywood movies. And the desire of women north of 45? Well, that’s been almost exclusively the province of Nancy Meyers, Meryl Streep and Diane Keaton. There have been others, sure, but it’s often either played for humor or scrubbed and sanitized of anything remotely carnal. Usually it’s some horrifyingly infantilized combination of both. It’s as though someone decided that audiences couldn’t possibly bear to watch a woman of menopause age acting or even feeling sexual and few have dared to challenge that notion.
That’s all to say that it is a small miracle that “ Good Luck to You, Leo Grande ,” a smart, nuanced and adamantly sex-positive film about a 55-year-old woman, exists. In the film, written by Katy Brand and directed by Sophie Hyde, Emma Thompson plays said woman. Nancy is a retired religion teacher and somewhat recent widow who hires a handsome young sex worker, the titular Leo Grande (Daryl McCormack), for a night.
We’re introduced to the characters, essentially the only ones in the film, in a perfect, dialogue-free sequence right before they meet. It tells you a lot about who they are and how they exist in the world, but not everything. There’s basically 90 minutes of wide-ranging conversations to follow that will help flesh out that whole conundrum.
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Nancy arrives at the tasteful hotel room armed with a sensible overnight roller bag, wearing a modest pencil skirt, matching blazer and floral blouse (her negligée is, hilariously, a not so different floral print). She’s flustered and rumpled and nervous as she switches from her flats to heels and checks the minibar. Leo, meanwhile, is a picture of youthful confidence and effortlessly put-together, as though he’s just stepped out of an advertisement for a trendy eco-conscious clothing startup. Together they’re not much different: She starts questioning her choice, chalking it up to a fit of madness and wondering what it says about her. He, meanwhile, continues to be cool, calm, charming and armed with a perfect response to everything.
The main reason for this “fit of madness” is that Nancy has never had an orgasm. She doesn’t expect to get one from the session with Leo, but she’s found herself with a bit of freedom finally after following rules, both self and societally imposed, for her entire life and has a few things she’d like to do. Nancy is deeply unsatisfied with her life, her body, her grown children (one is too boring, one is too wild) and her marriage. Repressed isn’t the right word, but perhaps unfulfilled is.
She can’t quite see or appreciate how lucky she is to have found Leo, who is patient and clever and not easy to write off. This drives her a bit mad, too, having lived life according to a set of principles that she knows haven’t brought her happiness and are outdated but that she’s not quite ready to let go of yet. And she will at various points over the next 90 minutes sabotage things.
Leo, both as a person and a character, is self-consciously styled as a bit of a fantasy. He’s there to be whatever his clients need him to be. The film doesn’t go especially deep into the world of sex work, though there are some references to bad clients and how it can be more unsafe for women. It is, for the most part, a rose-colored glasses version of what it could be.
Thompson is truly better than ever and brings to life a complex and evolving person with humor, grace and a sharp edge. McCormack, meanwhile, is a star in the making. And together, the two are magnetic in this wonderfully adult film that is funny, sad, awkward, empowering and illuminating.
The truth is, you don’t really know what audiences want if you’re not giving them the option. “It’s Complicated” and “Something’s Gotta Give” made almost $500 million at the box office, after all. “Leo Grande,” in 2022, shouldn’t really be a revelation. And maybe it’s not, but I’m still celebrating.
“Good Luck to You, Leo Grande,” a Searchlight Pictures release on Hulu Friday, is rated R by the Motion Picture Association for “sexual content, graphic nudity and some language.” Running time: 97 minutes. Three and a half stars out of four.
MPA Definition of R: Restricted. Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian.
Follow AP Film Writer Lindsey Bahr on Twitter: www.twitter.com/ldbahr
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Good Luck to You, Leo Grande review - Emma Thompson excels in stagey sex comedy The endlessly versatile actor plays a reserved widow who hires a sex worker in this enjoyably subversive...
Perhaps Good Luck to You, Leo Grande does not aspire to a piercingly profound analysis of sex and the human condition. It is, however, an amusing, compassionate and humane drama acted and...
"Leo Grande" has a light touch, and the dialogue is often hilarious, but depth is never sacrificed. There is a moment when Emma Thompson stares at her naked body in the mirror, probably for the first time. Physical nakedness is one thing. Emotional nakedness is another. "Good Luck to You, Leo Grande" has room for both. Now playing on Hulu.
And although the film about an older woman hiring a male prostitute feels ever so briefly like an updated tease of romance-novel fantasies, as directed by Sophie Hyde and written by Katy Brand,...
CNN — Emma Thompson lays herself bare in the dramedy "Good Luck to You, Leo Grande," but it's the emotional aspects that deserve the most attention, in this funny and sensitively told...
In GOOD LUCK TO YOU, LEO GRANDE, two-time Academy Award winner Emma Thompson (Love, Actually) embodies the candor and apprehension of retired teacher Nancy Stokes, and newcomer Daryl...
'Good Luck to You, Leo Grande' Review: Emma Thompson Gets in Touch With Her Sensual Side in a Gripping Two-Hander Seduction is the focus of this riveting conversation piece in which...
Insisting that a film about hiring a male escort is actually about intimacy sounds like some kind of reverse Pretty Woman fantasy. And Good Luck to You, Leo Grande (on Hulu June 17) seems at first ...
Good Luck to You, Leo Grande could easily have been packaged up as the kind of feel-good feminist power anthem that privileges personal liberation above all. But screenwriter Katy...
Featured review 7/10 So well acted. In the hands of clumsy performers, this script would be horrifying. But it wasn't and so it isn't. When we want sex there are always other hungers, other flavors that we desire. A widow seeks adventure, a sex worker seeks affirmation, perhaps praise that was never freely given.
Good Luck to You, Leo Grande Reviews - Metacritic Good Luck to You, Leo Grande movie reviews & Metacritic score: Nancy Stokes (Emma Thompson) doesn't know good sex. Whatever it may be, Nancy, a retired sch... search... Games Notable Video Game Releases: New and UpcomingSee All Reports Games Home >> New Releases Coming Soon
I really wanted to like Good Luck to You, Leo Grande.It's got a funny trailer and Emma Thompson has been passionately publicising her film. And while our screens are currently full of stories about twentysomething girls and their chaotic love lives, watching a 62-year old woman intent on enjoying sex with a younger man on her own terms seemed promising.
"Good Luck to You, Leo Grande" presents itself as a corrective, with an earnestness that verges on the Utopian; for all its low-key intimacy and emotional realism, this movie knows it's...
Parents need to know that Good Luck to You, Leo Grande is a two-character drama starring Emma Thompson and Daryl McCormack that tackles themes and subjects often considered taboo -- namely, that desire and pleasure are never anything to feel ashamed about. The film is a real celebration of self-confidence and the importance of loving your body, no matter its perceived flaws.
That's all to say that it is a small miracle that " Good Luck to You, Leo Grande," a smart, nuanced and adamantly sex-positive film about a 55-year-old woman, exists. In the film, written by Katy Brand and directed by Sophie Hyde, Emma Thompson plays said woman. Nancy is a retired religion teacher and somewhat recent widow who hires a ...
"Good Luck to You, Leo Grande" — drama and comedy movie produced in UK and released in 2022. It has a great rating on IMDb: 7.2 stars out of 10. It is a feature-length film with a runtime of 1h 37min. "Good Luck to You, Leo Grande" is currently available for rent and to buy on Apple TV, YouTube Movies and CHILI Play and to stream on Sky Store.
"Good Luck to You, Leo Grande" — drama and comedy movie produced in UK and released in 2022. It has a great rating on IMDb: 7.2 stars out of 10. It is a feature-length film with a runtime of 1h 37min. "Good Luck to You, Leo Grande" is currently available to stream on Hulu. Click on a playlink to watch it now!
"Good Luck to You, Leo Grande" — drama and comedy movie produced in UK and released in 2022. It has a great rating on IMDb: 7.2 stars out of 10. It is a feature-length film with a runtime of 1h 37min. "Good Luck to You, Leo Grande" is currently available to stream on Amazon Prime and for rent and to buy on Google Play.
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 ...
Good Luck to You, Leo Grande, so touchingly performed by Thompson and McCormack and sympathetically directed by Sophie Hyde, was written by the earnest comedian Katy Brand, a former evangelical Christian.
STREAM NOW. 7.2. Good Luck to You, Leo Grande. 2022, 1h 37min - Drama, Comedy Drama, Comedy
"Good Luck to You, Leo Grande" premiered at the 2022 Sundance Film Festival. Sign Up: Stay on top of the latest breaking film and TV news! Sign up for our Email Newsletters here.
The 2022 Sundance Film Festival has been filled with far more misses than hits.Well, today, I will admit the tides have turned. I share my review of Good Luck to You, Leo Grande.. Nancy is a ...
#film #cinema #movies #emmathompson #goodlucktoyouleogrande #pleasure #sofiakappel #ninjathyberg My GUARDIAN review of GOOD LUCK TO YOU, LEO GRANDE: https://...
That's all to say that it is a small miracle that " Good Luck to You, Leo Grande ," a smart, nuanced and adamantly sex-positive film about a 55-year-old woman, exists. In the film, written by Katy Brand and directed by Sophie Hyde, Emma Thompson plays said woman. Nancy is a retired religion teacher and somewhat recent widow who hires a ...