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.
