Emma bares body and soul in touching tale of sexual awakening
Good Luck To You, Leo Grande (15, 97 mins) Verdict: Intimate and honest ★★★★I
MeN seeking sexual satisfaction with much younger women, be they wives, girlfriends, mistresses, prostitutes or concubines, have been a mainstay of cinematic storytelling ever since the silent era. Woody Allen practically built a career out of it.
Switch the genders and you have to rack your brains. Daniel Craig and Anne Reid got it on across a 32-year age gap in The mother (2003), and i can think of a few other pictures down the years, but what’s the ratio? maybe 10,000 to one?
Sure, cinema largely reflects society. But there is also plenty of hypocrisy, and a good deal of moral spluttering, when a film comes along in which a woman beds a much younger man. There was even some earlier this year directed at Paul Thomas Anderson’s Licorice Pizza, a movie brimming with wit, charm and innocence, but chronicling the relationship between Gary, in his mid teens, and Alana, aged 25.
So batten down the hatches in readiness for Good Luck to You, Leo Grande, in which emma Thompson plays widowed Nancy, a former Re teacher to boot, who doesn’t just have sex with a guy barely a third of her age, but pays for it.
The Peaky Blinders actor Daryl mcCormack plays a male escort, who has adopted the name Leo Grande.
UNTiL the last of four separate acts, Sophie Hyde’s funny, moving, thoughtprovoking film, smartly scripted by comedian Katy Brand, features just these two characters in a series of hotel-room trysts. There is duly a slightly theatrical feel to proceedings, but such is the quality of both the acting and writing, it never feels stagey.
When we (and Leo) first meet her, Nancy is a bag of nerves. it is two years since the death of her husband Robert, the only man she has ever been to bed with — ‘there are nuns out there with more sexual experience,’ she says — and now she has decided that she wants to hire an escort.
even when Robert was alive, theirs was a robotic sex life which always left her ‘disappointed’. But the arrival of this handsome, selfassured, worldly young irishman plunges her into self-doubt. The age difference alone is alarming. Does she really want to go through with it? Leo has a quick wit and abundant charm. He tells Nancy he likes her perfume. ‘Coco Chanel . . . Nigella Lawson wears it,’ she gabbles by way of reply. Leo says he finds Nigella sexy. Nancy waits for him to add ‘for her age’. But he doesn’t. He is a man in complete command of their transactional situation, overcoming its potential for awkwardness by effortlessly flirting with her.
Yet his confidence intensifies her own mounting anxiety, compounded by phone calls from her grown-up daughter, who, of course, has no idea what her mother is up to.
Leo tells her that his oldest customer was 82, which makes her feel a little better, but she cannot shake off the feeling that what she is about to do is irredeemably, indefensibly seedy. ‘i feel like Rolf Harris all of a sudden,’ she says. Leo’s family back in ireland don’t know what he does for a living — he tells them he works on a North Sea oil rig — and over the course of three meetings, slowly but very effectively, and thanks to a brilliantly nuanced performance by mcCormack, his own vulnerabilities begin to show.
Nancy, by contrast, is growing in self- esteem. She also begins to feel an intimacy beyond their physical connection — but is she starting to misinterpret their relationship?
Brand’s excellent script keeps
all this real, faltering only once or twice when Nancy’s guilelessness feels a bit forced, but otherwise sustaining our interest in knowing how it might end.
Wisely, the questionable morality of paying for sex is not overlooked (Nancy used to get her secondaryschool pupils to write essays on the subject), although anyone who feels strongly that it is intrinsically wrong in any circumstances should probably give this film a swerve.
But really it is a rite-of-passage story made with humour and sensitivity, and hats off to Thompson, not to mention towelling robes, for fleetingly exposing her sexagenarian body not just to a single camera but also to widespread comment. There is bound to be plenty.
Yet nudity is not the point of this film. Nor, even, is sex. it is about emotional growth, and how we’re never too old for it.
■ A SHORTER version of this review ran last Friday.