The words “British sex comedy” will strike an icy chill into the heart of anyone raised on a diet of Brian Rix trouser-losing theatrical farces and films such as Carry on Camping and Confessions of a Window Cleaner. Yet despite such a blush-inducing heritage, the inelegantly named Good Luck To You, Leo Grande manages to keep one foot firmly on the floor of enjoyably progressive entertainment even as it dances around a peculiarly British minefield in which anxiety and openness about intimacy collide.
Directed by Sophie Hyde (who made the 2019 Sundance hit Animals) from an often hilarious if somewhat theatrical script by Katy Brand, this stagey two-hander presents a chaptered series of hotel-room encounters between an uptight, recently widowedwoman and an unfeasibly lovable handsome young sex worker. “I don’t like anything going into places where things are meant to come out,” deadpans Emma Thompson’s Nancy, a retired RE teacher who has never had an orgasm (her missionary-positioned marriage was not so much “a furnace of passion that burned out” as simply “the bottom drawer of an Aga”) and now has a list of “attainable goals” that she’d “like to get through” to see what all the fuss was about.
Having only ever slept with her husband, Nancy’s knowledge of sex work (a heady cocktail of anxious middle-class guilt and brusque practicality) comes largely from the Wikipedia-copied essays of her students for whom the question “Should it be legalised?” was a regular set topic. Meanwhile, the titular erudite service provider (smoothly played by Peaky Blinders alumnus Daryl McCormack) has mummy issues that dovetail neatly with his jittery client’s own parental shortcomings, something that will become apparent during their extracoital exchanges, which form the backbone of the drama.
It’s no surprise that the endlessly versatile Thompson (who effortlessly stole films such as Love, Actually and An Education in which she played ensemble or supporting parts) should be note-perfect in a tragicomic role that requires her to declare: “I don’t want an old man, I want a young one” before swiftly admitting: “I’m just a seedy old pervert – I feel like Rolf Harris!” There’s the merest hint of Death in Venice about her infatuation with youth, a reminder of the grief she feels for the time she has wasted and the erotic spark of the time she has left. “I want to play at being young again,” she tells her paid-for paramour, explicitly stating the film’s barely hidden subtextual intertwining of la petite mort with an awareness of impending mortality.
At times, I was reminded of the broad, physically awkward comedy of the Vanessa Taylor-scripted Hope Springs, in particular the scene in which Meryl Streep ends up distractedly eating the banana she’s taken into the bathroom to research oral sex. There’s even an unexpected echo of Leonard Rossiter’s Rigsby from Rising Damp about Thompson’s performance, at least in the early scenes – over-loquacious, physically fiddlesome, befuddled by attraction, yet somehow lacking empathy as if talking to herself, something that will change as she mellows over the course of the drama.
As for McCormack’s endlessly accommodating gigolo (a distant British descendant of Richard Gere’s American Julian) he’s described as “some sort of sex saint… a master of the menopause” – too good to be true. When Thompson asks: “Are you real?” the answer of course is that he is not. Leo’s profession may call for convincing role play, but McCormack and Thompson are also dexterous actors playing characters into whom I confess I never quite bought. Compare this screen couple with Anne Reid and Daniel Craig in Roger Michell’s The Mother and the air of performative artifice becomes all the more apparent.
None of which is to say that Good Luck to You, Leo Grande isn’t admirably subversive and enjoyably whimsical fare, a quality amplified by Stephen Rennicks’s score, which flits lightly between laughter and tears while keeping things firmly in the easy-listening register.
