Daryl McCormack and Emma Thompson inGood Luck to You,Leo Grande.Credit:AP
Nancy is a widow in her 60s who elects for a session with a sex worker because 31 years of marriage has failed to provide her with a clue as to what is meant by the joy of sex. Now she’s determined to solve the mystery. She has in mind a shopping list of sexual positions and if all goes well,Leo (Daryl McCormack),young,buff and graced with a pleasing intuitiveness,will help her experience her first orgasm. But along with the shopping list,she brings her inhibitions. If she and Leo are to get anywhere,he must first persuade her to let him touch her.
You could call Brand’s script an exercise in delayed gratification except that it elevates the delay itself into an entertaining and perceptive exploration of eroticism and its many subtleties. Glints of self-deprecating humour illuminate every stage of Nancy and Leo’s relationship,which means that the film is perfect for Thompson – as it should be. Brand wrote the role for her,confident of her gift for gliding from the poignant to the comic in a single take.
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It’s a talent shared by Hyde. Her last feature,Animals, (2019) was a small gem about the friendship between two girls who are coming to a painful parting of the ways because one is ready to grow up while the other wants life to go on being one long party. It was a serious story done with the lightest of touches.
Nancy’s first hurdle is to get over her embarrassment at the contrast between Leo’s physical perfection and the signs of wear and tear that the passing years have stamped on her own body. As they both stand gazing into the mirror,she finally concedes,with Leo’s encouragement,that she quite likes her calves. It’s a decisive breakthrough.
Nancy doesn’t much like her body at the start of her four meetings with sex worker Leo Grande,but by the end is able to accept and even appreciate it in its full naked glory.