Mark Reviews Movies: GOOD LUCK TO YOU, LEO GRANDE

Good Luck to You, Leo Grande, Searchlight Pictures

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Review by Mark Dujsik | June 16, 2022

The relationship between the main characters in Good Luck to You, Leo Grande is entirely transactional, despite how intimate it is. She wants sex. He is willing to provide it for a set amount of money.

He likes to see people experience pleasure, and she might—as soon as she gets past all of the social stigmas and personal hang-ups that are preventing her from even trying to do so. As an expert in reading people and understanding how to get them to open up on just about every level, he can help that, but it's going to be a challenge.

There's an intriguing dichotomy to Katy Brand's screenplay, which does present sex work as a business—while arguing both directly and implicitly that it should be a legal, legitimate, and, hence, safe one, as well—but also dives into the lives, histories, and deeper issues of characters who exist in an anonymous state to one another. Most of the escort's work, he explains, does remain anonymous, because a lot of his clients want it that way. He shows up, gives a client what they want (which isn't always sex, as he notes one woman, a regular, simply wants to hold his hand while watching television), and leaves without a hassle and, hopefully, with the possibility of returning for another appointment.

He's Leo Grande (Daryl McCormack)—or, at least, that's what he calls himself in his professional role. The man has easy charm and a disarming way of speaking without evasion. He'd make a good salesperson, and in a way, he already is one. He's selling, not so much himself or his body, but the fantasy of being whoever or whatever someone wants him to be for a certain block of time.

What we see of him at first in the hotel room where most of this story takes place appears to be the truth of the man. There's a quiet moment, though, when his newest client is changing in the bathroom, and director Sophie Hyde cuts back and forth between the woman and Leo. Alone in his underwear and on the bed, he appears nervous or just a bit uncertain, trying to find the correct pose—comfortable but also seductive, without looking too much like either—and sport just the right expression.

It's a brief scene and also seemingly inconsequential one, but the moment cuts through the fantasy, the illusion, and the show Leo has adopted as soon as his new client opened the hotel room door. There is more to this man, who seems so unflappably confident but finds himself at something of a loss while figuring out something as simple as lying in a bed.

Leo's new client is Nancy Stokes (Emma Thompson)—again, if that's actually her real name, which it isn't. She is, though, a retired religious education teacher and a widow. The religion part doesn't seem to matter too much, except that she has spent a career discussing the morality and ethics of sex and, on occasion, sex work with secondary schoolers, and now she finds herself directly confronted with and conflicted by the possibility of paying for sex—well, technically, for Leo's company, although the sex is an unofficial part of that.

As for being a widow, her husband died unexpectedly two years prior, and he had been Nancy's only sex partner for the entirety of her life—and un unfulfilling one, at that. There was a lot he wouldn't do, because he found it "demeaning"—always in relation to himself, never her. "There are nuns with more sexual experience than me," an embarrassed Nancy points out to Leo, and she wants that to change. If Leo is a mystery, Nancy is an open book, and that's another dichotomy that Brand uses to considerable effect here—not only in contrasting the two characters, but also in bringing a certain level of tension and drama to matters, once Nancy decides she isn't entirely happy or comfortable with the mystery, the fantasy, and the illusion that is Leo.

Until a late scene, this story is a two-hander, set entirely in the same hotel room over the course of four meetings (The fourth begins elsewhere, for reasons that won't be revealed). It's a showcase for both the two actors, who bare a lot more than skin, and Brand's screenplay, which deals with a lot more than sex. That's not to undermine Hyde's direction, which clearly is primarily devoted the actors but is also smart in how and why it frames these characters together or separately, as well as how far or close the camera is to them.

It is, though, to say that Brand's script cleverly and pointedly drives what's essentially an extended conversation through a variety of topics. Those include but are not limited to the ethics and legal questions of sex work, aging, the expectations culture and society place on both men and women in terms of physical appearance, parenthood and the obligations a child feels toward a parent's approval, and, of course, sex itself. These two characters—their experiences, their doubts and fears, their hopes—define the rationale and course of those discussions, so it always feels natural.

Completely selling the flow of that discussion are the two leads of Good Luck to You, Leo Grande. There's more, though, to the work of Thompson, playing a bundle of nervous and self-critical energy, and McCormack, putting on the airs of a kind of ideal but letting us see through the cracks of that performance. The real intimacy of the film is the sense of discovering the real people behind a transactional façade.

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