Good Luck to You, Leo Grande ★★★★
(M) 97 minutes

A fashionable romantic cliché in both film and television has a pair of would-be lovers dreamily letting themselves into an empty room, ripping off one another’s clothes and having frenzied sex on every available surface.

Good Luck to You, Leo Grande, in which Emma Thompson gets together with a male sex worker, is not like that. Written by British comic Katy Brand and deftly directed by Australia’s Sophie Hyde, it succeeds in resisting all the familiar cliches about love and sex. While Thompson’s Nancy Stokes knows exactly what she wants and we guess from the outset that she’s eventually going to get it, the film offers up an abundance of conversational foreplay before any progress is made.

Daryl McCormack and Emma Thompson in Good 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.

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.

McCormack skilfully carries off the more difficult role of the two. As we watch him gradually become absorbed in the puzzle that Nancy presents, he succeeds in convincing us – and her – that he sees his job as nothing less than a vocation. His own satisfaction comes from finding ways to give pleasure.

Soon she’s relaxed enough to tell him about her career as a teacher and her life with a husband who provided everything but what she wanted most – sexual fulfilment. She even comes out with the rueful admission that she finds her grown-up children a disappointment. Her daughter is immature and her son is boring.

But just as this blossoming friendship is about to translate into something more sensual, she crosses an invisible line by trying to coax Leo into reciprocating by offering up some secrets of his own. At this, he shocks her by getting angry – an abrupt switch in tone which McCormack negotiates with a dignity that is revealing in itself. You realise that he can continue to do what he does only by withholding the most sensitive aspects of his emotional life.

It’s an insightful bit of writing which rounds out his character and staves off any suggestion that he’s merely a catalyst in Nancy’s sexual emancipation. By the time they get to the climax – both hers and the film’s – the two of them have become equals. The discrepancy in age doesn’t matter any more and the revelations made on both sides have brought them to a state of mutual understanding. Best of all, it plays out without a trace of either the sentimental or the judgmental.

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