Good Luck to You, Leo Grande. M, 97 minutes, 4 stars
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Emma Thompson shines as a buttoned-up retired and widowed religious education teacher who hires a male sex worker to acquaint her with the sexual life she missed across decades of quiet and monogamous marriage in this charming film from Aussie filmmaker Sophie Hyde.
Writer Katy Brand's script could have been a stage play, as it's mostly set between two people and in hotel rooms, a riposte of dialogue and intimate exchanges.
Despite it being about a sex worker, I don't mean sex when I say intimate exchanges.
As the film opens, we meet Leo Grande (Daryl McCormack) sitting in a cafe, his attire matching its pastel decor, and as he puts on his jacket and takes to the street, we might see that he is getting into character.
Nancy (Emma Thompson) is waiting in a hotel room for Leo.
She has booked his services for intimate escort work, but she has a lot to take off before they can get down to it.
I don't mean her twin-set or her pantyhose, I mean the years of frustration and repression and possibly even anger and self-loathing she's parked while performing the duties as wife to her recently dead husband or mother to her two now-adult children or through her years as a teacher of religious education in a senior high school.
She wants Leo to show her what she's been missing, possibly even the orgasm she has never experienced, but she is also full of anxiety about her body, her desirability and her own shame at doing something so out of character.
This expresses itself in long conversations with Leo to find her own comfort levels, and occasionally lashing out at him with her own judgements.
The pair get to know each other on a surface level, and Leo eventually calms Nancy into accepting the service she has paid for, and which will continue across another handful of meetings.
But Nancy's awakening doesn't come smoothly and she crosses the unspoken boundaries that exist between service provider and client.
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While the film occasionally veers into the erotic, it still maintains its M rating.
McCormack is a very handsome man, and the filmmakers have cast him well, both as an object of objectification, but also as a subtle actor.
There's not a wrong note between McCormack and Thompson. She has considerably more experience in performance, but both give felt and nuanced work.
Leo is a performer himself, getting into his role as seducer and making his clients feel valued and wanted, possibly feeling it himself and not just pretending. That's a lot to convey.
Isabella Laughland shines in the film's only other role, as a waitress whom Nancy taught as a girl.
Emma Thompson can do no wrong in my book and Nancy is another wonderful performance, not the butt of some joke as an ageing woman with a libido, as this film might have portrayed her if it were made 20 years earlier or by a man. She's a deeply felt person who understands she's been hiding her own light under a bushel and who takes some time in uncovering it, and then in coping with the glare when it is exposed.
That intimate two-step between Thompson and McCormack is mirrored behind the camera by that between writer Katy Brand and director Sophie Hyde. Brand's dialogue might not be as enjoyable without Hyde's sense of comic timing, elevated by her innate understanding of performance interplay. The conversational dynamics meander, ebb and flow, like a war and a detente, or like a dance. That dance is always also in movement between cinematographer Bryan Mason's camera and his performers, which make a tango of what might otherwise have been a shuffle.