Good Luck to You, Leo Grande * * * * ½

Ninety percent of this film is set in one location  - a hotel room, so naturally I wondered if  it had been adapted from a stage play.  It hasn't.  Screenwriter Katy Brand wrote it for the screen - and what a superb job she has done!  As equally satisfying is the direction by Sophie Hyde (Animals).  As for actors Emma Thompson  and Daryl McCormack, they absolutely shine.

This is an intelligent and important film which portrays its chosen subject with extraordinary sensitivity and exactness.  Just by witnessing these people it puts paid to any criticisms that the world has for those who wish to enjoy, express or experience their own sexuality in their own way.  

Emma Thompson plays Nancy, a retired Religious Education teacher. Her husband died two years ago. He was the only person she ever had sex with. Now in her sixties she is wondering what it would be like to have sex again, and perhaps experience the things she never did with her husband in their pedestrian sex life.

Daryl and Nancy strip away the BS.

Nancy checks into an hotel room and hires a sex-worker to come visit her - Leo Grande.  Played by Daryl McCormack (Peaky Blinders), he is a near flawless representation of a normal, human sex-worker.  (At last! Someone absent of all the usual repetitive lazy stereotypes that films like to show.) 

Naturally, because of her awkwardness their dialogue can be very funny at times. She tells him he will be only the second man she has gone to bed with. He reassures her it's all fine and he answers her many questions about what he does. It's an education for the audience as well as Nancy.   Nancy goes on to talk about the most memorable sexual experience she had which was when she was a teenager. Her narration of the event is hypnotic.  

She goes to the bathroom.  Then she announces she wants to pull out of it. He lets her know that is her right if she so wishes.  She changes her mind again.  Then they finally go to bed, and we cut...

We pick up again a few weeks later.  She has hired Leo for another session, and now the exploration continues - as does the humor and the enlightenment.  She presents Leo with a checklist of the things she wants to do.  

Then there is a third meeting which can only be described as disastrous for them. It was this scene, and a revelation from Leo's past that disappointed me a little, as it gave suggestion that he was in fact damaged. Like they couldn't just let a sex-worker be a normal balanced person.  But putting that disappointment aside, it must be acknowledged that as far as the story goes,  it gives balance to the things that Nancy has spoken about, especially  in regard to her relationship with her own adult children. They depart acrimoniously.

The final scene is outside of the bedroom. It is sometime later and Nancy wishes to apologise to Leo for some of the things she said in their previous encounter.  Now a third character - a student from Nancy's past is introduced.  Naïve and completely lacking in discretion she unwittingly gives Nancy an opportunity to open up about her regrets, but also about declaring her future with honesty.  

Given it's confines, Good Luck to You, Leo Grande, might not be the best cinematic experience I have had this year, but it would be one of the best dramas I have seen.