Sophie Hyde (2022)

I chickened out of Sophie Hyde’s sex dramedy at the cinema last year because of its star.  In her public statements and appearances Emma Thompson gives the impression of almost indecent self-confidence:  the prospect of watching her pretend to be someone desperately inhibited – and of an audience audibly lapping this up – was intimidating.  I caught up with Good Luck to You, Leo Grande in the privacy of BFI Player.

Thompson’s character, Nancy Stokes, is about sixty – a mother of two, a widow, now retired from teaching religious studies in a secondary school.  Nancy Stokes isn’t her real name:  it’s the one she uses to book a hotel room for the afternoon, there to meet with a male sex worker half her age – Leo Grande (Daryl McCormack).  That turns out not to be his real name either but Leo is more comfortable with his line of work than Nancy is about paying for his services.  On this first meeting with him, she’s a whirlwind of tense dither; not much physical happens between them.  But Leo, contrastingly relaxed, is sympathetic to Nancy’s self-reproachful anxiety and encourages her to talk about herself.  She reveals she’s never had an orgasm in her life although she faked them throughout her thirty-one-year marriage.  She’s never had oral sex either; her late husband, the only sexual partner she ever had, considered that demeaning.  For his part, Leo tells Nancy that he finds his line of work often interesting, sometimes rewarding and not at all demeaning – despite this particular client’s seeming to think he should.  Leo does admit that he hasn’t told his mother what his job is:  she thinks he works on an oil rig.  That makes Nancy laugh, briefly but almost hysterically.

She books another session with Leo in the same room, a week later.  Those last two phrases suggest a play text and Leo Grande often seems to belong in a theatre rather than on a cinema screen.  Until early in its last act, the piece is a two-hander; until an even later point, it’s nearly all talk.  Nancy’s fears of letting herself go are a pretext for that but the film’s lack of visual life, even within the limits of its nearly one-set location, is a problem.  (We first see Leo emerging from a café onto the street; there’s a longer sequence in the café of the hotel where he and Nancy meet; otherwise it’s all the booked room.)  This is the third feature from Australian film-maker Sophie Hyde; although she directs very capably Emma Thompson and Daryl McCormack (in his first lead role in cinema), Hyde frames the action unimaginatively.  There’s no sense of claustrophobia or security or anything else much in the hotel room.  Even its impersonality barely registers.

This is a first screenplay by the British comedy writer and performer Katy Brand.  She shows a good ear for dialogue and supplies some funny, insightful moments but the script as a whole is unsatisfying.  Brand presumably wanted to explore a self-doubting, frustrated, late-middle-aged woman rather than a fit young man who makes his living selling sexual services; she obviously recognised that wasn’t enough material for a feature-length script.  The fundamental imbalance of her interest in the two characters always shows, though.  For the first half of the film, Leo is a virtual fantasy figure – handsome, courteous, sensitive, funny.  Later on, Brand tries to give him substance by revealing that he’s not only estranged from his brother but was disowned by his mother when he was fifteen (when she caught him and his friends engaging in group sex).  Between their second and third sessions, Nancy does some online research to discover Leo’s real name (Connor – but I’ll stick with Leo).  At the third session, after he has performed oral sex on her, she asks if they can be friends and offers to speak with his mother to bring about reconciliation.  These things express not credible facets of Nancy’s personality but Katy Brand’s sense of obligation to give Leo backstory – because that’s what you do in a two-character study.  Nancy’s inhibitions aren’t the only straitjacket at work here.

Brand’s comedy writing is more anchored in character – Nancy’s character, that is – although some bits work better than others.  It’s amusing that congenitally well-organised Nancy arrives for the second session armed with a checklist of sexual experiments (which they are to her) to work through.  It’s a lame idea that attempts to get going on this agenda – item one, fellatio – are repeatedly thwarted by Nancy’s answering calls on her mobile from her crisis-prone daughter.  (She doesn’t much like either of her children:  she admits, guiltily but more than once, to finding her son boring.)

Angered by Nancy’s intrusion in his personal life, Leo storms out of their third session and it’s surprising that he agrees to a fourth.  In the clumsy prelude to this, while Nancy waits for him in the deserted hotel café, the cast more than doubles:  Nancy is plagued by a trio of waitresses (Charlotte Ware, Carina Lopes, Isabella Laughland).  The last of these, Becky (Laughland), recognises Nancy as her former RE teacher, Mrs Robinson – a knowing nod to the gulf between this older woman and her namesake in The Graduate.  Once Leo arrives, Nancy starts explaining things to him at a rate of knots:  her real forename is Susan (I will use that from now on); he has awoken her sexually; she has recommended him to friends.  Becky chips in with a recollection of how Mrs Robinson once branded her and her schoolmates ‘sluts’ because of their short skirts.  Susan, after apologising for this, recommends Leo’s services to Becky, too.

After more than an hour of discretion that verges on pussyfooting, Leo Grande bursts into a finale as candid as it’s energetic.  This is meant, of course, to reflect the transformation that Leo has wrought in Susan – and there are plenty of sex acts still to get through on her list in what both know will be their last session together.  Even so – and even though Sophie Hyde is Australian and Daryl McCormack Irish – the whiff of no-sex-please-we’re-British that hangs round most of the film makes its eventual, abrupt change of gear feel more like loss of control than liberation.  Given the set-up, it’s as inevitable that Susan will finally have her first orgasm as it was that Margaret in Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret. (2023) would get her first period.  The orgasm arrives as Susan pleasures herself watching Leo, as he searches for a sex toy, stroll nude around the room.  He then gets dressed, they shake hands and Susan speaks the farewell words that give the film its title.

Daryl McCormack may not be a great actor (he was nothing special as the detective in the dreary mystery drama The Women in the Wall on television earlier this year) but he’s likeable and, within the limits of his role, very effective in Good Luck to You, Leo Grande.  Emma Thompson, when she expresses Nancy-Susan’s thoughts and feelings through her face and body, comes up with some of the best acting I’ve seen from her.  This culminates in the very last scene when, after Leo’s departure, Susan stands naked at a full-length mirror to appraise – and eventually approve of – her ageing body.  The idea is pat but Thompson’s nerve and the light in her eyes elevate the moment.  When she speaks (and she speaks a lot), she tends to be relatively artificial, although she shows some expert timing – and knows when to throw away Katy Brand’s more comically emphatic one-liners.

5 December 2023