52 Films by Women Vol 6. 50. GOOD LUCK TO YOU, LEO GRANDE (Director: Sophie Hyde)
Good Luck to You, Leo Grande is about the pursuit of female pleasure. Pleasure without guilt, in
which the transaction isn’t just financial. It is also about the danger of
being a surrogate mother in the bedroom experienced by the protagonist,
fifty-something widow, Nancy Stokes (Emma Thompson). Reconciled to never having
an orgasm, Nancy wants to experience sex with a much younger man and hires a
male prostitute, twenty-something Leo Grande (Daryl McCormack) to please here.
Structured around a series of meetings in a luxury hotel in Norwich, the film
‘written and created’ by comedian Katy Brand and directed by Sophie Hyde,
explores the tension between buttoned-down former Religious Education teacher
Nancy and easy-on-the-eye fantasy plaything, Leo. The performances by Thompson
and McCormack are terrific, but what catches the eye are the open curtains in
the hotel room, allowing them to be seen from the outside. The curtains are
only closed when – well, that would be telling.
Brand’s screenplay resembles a stage play. For the majority of the film,
we are stuck in the hotel room, with Nancy complaining about her boring adult
son and his boring girlfriend. ‘Just like his father,’ she explains. Nancy
hasn’t had sex with a man since her husband, Robert, died. Sex with him was a
perfunctory act – lying next to her naked, mounting her, a modest amount of
breast manipulation, a series of thrusts, discharge, put on his pyjamas and out
like a light. Nancy yearns for something different. ‘I don’t want to be young,’
she explains, ‘that would be horrible. I want to feel young.’ She wants what
Leo can give her but is simultaneously afraid of it.
The film elicits a fair number of chuckles, but actually sacrifices
Nancy’s real desire in the cause of a saucy joke. ‘I’ve got feedback and some attainment
goals,’ she tells Leo, seeking a ‘blow job’, sex ‘doggy style’ and ‘something
called a 69, if they still do those’. Leo smiles appreciatively. At no point
does Nancy ask, ‘can you help me locate my erogenous zones?’ Nor does she
confess, ‘I’m having trouble stimulating my clitoris’. In other words, a film
about elusive female sexual pleasure is afraid of naming the drivers of female
sexual pleasure.
Nancy’s choice of profession is Brand’s way of tackling the question,
‘how can I make my protagonist seem sexually uptight?’ Nancy is jaded and
cynical about having been a teacher, unable to deviate from the curriculum,
essentially coaxing young girls to pass their exams, though she refers to ‘Year
8’s’, who would be 14 at the eldest and not likely to take any exams of note. I
would have thought a Religious Education teacher would be familiar with the
Kama Sutra, but we’ll let that one go. Predominantly, the film is about the
fear of gratification, which is a polite way of saying, it takes its time.
Nancy quizzes the mixed-race Leo as a means of deferring intimate
contact, asking about his mother – but, pointedly, never about his father, one
of those omissions that says something about Brand’s perception of mixed-race
children – the father is never around. Isn’t this racist? Isn’t it, just! For
his part, Leo is determined to put Nancy at her ease, though I didn’t believe
he would help himself to the mini-bar when Nancy’s back is turned – she is in
the bathroom, changing into an exotic nightie. This is supposed to say
something about him but is at odds with his professionalism. He gets caught out
eating half a Mars Bar. Nancy has paid in advance for his services; she is
entitled to a refund if a paid sex worker incurs additional hotel charges. ‘I’m
not rich,’ she tells him, when Leo describes how he has a set of regular
clients. Indeed, she positively bridles at what she calls Leo’s ‘sales pitch’.
The Mars Bar moment is a way of Brand telling us, she doesn’t quite know
how to write Leo’s character. He explains that he told his family that he
worked on an oil rig, but of course it’s a lie. Late in the film, he explains
what his mother thinks of him. I found the source of their estrangement – Leo
being caught having naked fun with a bunch of his friends – not entirely
credible. At that point, Leo tells Nancy, ‘I was dead to her.’ No, Leo/Brand –
try again. Judging by the pink sweatshirt Leo rocks towards the end of the
film, we are meant to infer he is gay or at least bi-curious.
The performances in what is basically a two-hander keep us interested.
Thompson, an experienced comedian, knows how to use her body to convey
awkwardness, stooping slightly as she waits for Leo to arrive. The first image
of Leo, hands behind his head, wearing a yellow woolly hat, humming to himself
whilst sitting in the window of a coffee shop, sends a series of mixed
messages. He looks at a man emerge from a door pushing an empty goods trolley,
the camera swirling around him. Leo appears to give the trolley man an admiring
look. He certainly pauses to check his own reflection. Nancy is repressed but
Brand, Thompson and Hyde try to ground the character in her anxiety about how
she looks and her forthright rejection of men her age who desire her. ‘They’re
old,’ she complains.
Nancy’s backstory involves a family holiday to Greece, at which she was
kissed and fondled by a waiter who found her attractive – the Shirley Valentine effect. The headlamps of a car caused the
young man to run away. ‘I wish we could have stayed another day,’ Nancy
whimpers.
Leo objects to Nancy’s persistent questioning and her revelation that she
knows his real name – Connor – finding it on Companies House website. (And yet
the clitoris eludes her.) She breaks Leo, arguably a worse exploitation of him
than any sex act they could perform. For his part, storming back in the room to
find his phone, he’s destructive. The scene makes what happens next somewhat
surprising. We don’t really believe Leo and Nancy will see each other again.
There is a comic cameo from Isabella Laughland, as Becky, who recognises
Nancy as her former teacher, Susan Robinson. ‘Mrs Robinson,’ smirks Leo, when
he meets Becky. Laughland is a ringer for a young Katy Brand – it is a neat way
for Hyde to reflect the sensibility of her writer. Becky plonks herself down
and tells Leo how Mrs Robinson ‘called us all sluts’ for the pupils’ dress
sense. ‘She also taught me a word: concupiscence.’ What does it mean? Becky and
Nancy answer in unison: sensual longing. (Actually, I forgot their definition.
I had to look it up.)
Nancy’s interest is piqued by his vocabulary: his use of the word
‘empirically’ to describe Nigella Lawson. ‘You must be a clever person,’ she
notes. ‘Why are you doing this?’ Leo doesn’t want to answer that question and
neither does Brand. When Leo describes his customers, we get what draws him to
the job, acting as a therapist or nurse. He describes how he bathes a disabled
woman while talking dirty to her and then getting into the bath. And they say
Disabled Living Allowance is too low. ‘Another man has me dress up as a cat.’ I
should have thought Leo would be duty bound not to describe his other clients,
but the inference is that they stimulate him. This is the only explanation for
the final encounter between Nancy and Leo, though I didn’t believe he would really
want to see her.
In the first two meetings, pity is definitely a factor. Mars Bar lapse
aside, Leo tries to please Nancy, helping her overcome her own inhibitions
about her aged body. Nancy gets quite aggressive, insisting that her list
should be met. There are points where we lose sympathy for her.
Finally, there is an explosion of sex. Stretching every sinew, Thompson
looks younger. Only in the final scene, when she looks at her body, does the
opposite seem true. Thompson throws away her vanity to remind us of a real
woman. You can’t imagine Meryl Streep doing the same.
In the first section of the film, Thompson is lit to appear pale. Only
gradually do her cheeks become red. There are subtle changes to her wardrobe –
flowery attire in the first and second meetings, giving way to a simpler, less
busy design, as Nancy gets closer to sexual ecstasy. Leo’s shirts get less
formal. In the first scene, he wears an ironed white shirt. By the end he is
wearing a pink sweatshirt. Occasionally, Hyde photographs Thompson so that we
see the rings around her eyes.
The farewell of the title is the film’s clunkiest moment. Leo’s problem
has been revealed but not solved. We see him walk down a street with a jaunty
stride, but it isn’t credible. Does he think his job is done? Perhaps. Is that
enough? Perhaps not. He is, to a certain extent, idealised, a twerk-es-machina
who dances with Nancy to get her to relax – calls from her daughter agitate
her. Although there is an obvious climax, the film isn’t completely satisfying.
Each character isn’t given equal weight.
Reviewed at Sundance London, Picturehouse Central, Shaftesbury Avenue,
Tuesday 7 June 2022, 11:00am (press screening) and Curzon Canterbury, Kent
(Screen Three), Wednesday 22 June 2022, 17:40 screening
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