[Critics are fawning over Good Luck to You, Leo Grande for its
“brave” sex positivity. But the crowd-pleasing comedy is actually
anxiously prescriptive, and it relies on an angelic and selfless sex
worker to teach a middle-aged woman how to love her body.]
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PORTSIDE CULTURE

GOOD LUCK TO YOU, LEO GRANDE HAS A “MAGIC SEX WORKER” PROBLEM  
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Eileen Jones
June 23, 2022
Jacobin
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_ Critics are fawning over Good Luck to You, Leo Grande for its
“brave” sex positivity. But the crowd-pleasing comedy is actually
anxiously prescriptive, and it relies on an angelic and selfless sex
worker to teach a middle-aged woman how to love her body. _

Daryl McCormack and Emma Thompson in Good Luck to You, Leo Grande.,
(Searchlight Pictures)

 

The reviews of _Good Luck to You, Leo Grande_
[[link removed]] practically write
themselves. Based on a preview, or even a description, of the
crowd-pleasing comedy that debuted to big cheers at the Sundance Film
Festival and is now streaming on Hulu, you can generate something
like this
[[link removed]]:

It’s a relief to see a film so frank about sex, and so open to
sex’s complexities, especially when so much of current cinema is
sexless to a disheartening degree. “Leo Grande” cares about sex
for older women, and not just sex, but the baggage associated with
sex, and how that baggage robs us of joy and fulfillment. Also
revelatory is the film’s non-judgmental attitude towards sex work. .
. . These are tough topics. “Leo Grande” has a light touch, and
the dialogue is often hilarious, but depth is never sacrificed. There
is a moment when Emma Thompson stares at her naked body in the mirror,
probably for the first time. Physical nakedness is one thing.
Emotional nakedness is another. “Good Luck to You, Leo Grande” has
room for both.

Sure, sure. It can be generally agreed upon that ever-likable Emma
Thompson gives a career-capping performance as a repressed middle-aged
widow who hires a sex worker (Daryl McCormack of _Peaky Blinders_) to
provide the erotic satisfaction her marriage never gave her. All very
nice.

But it’s so schematic that it’s unsettling. It’s not just that
the majority of the reviews could’ve been produced by an automatic
text generator. So could the script, after plugging in a series of
topical terms like “sex positivity,” “unhealthy body image,”
“middle-aged woman feeling invisible,” and “generational
differences.”

Written by English comedian Katy Brand and directed by Australian
filmmaker Sophie Hyde, this UK-based film is almost entirely staged
inside an upscale hotel bedroom where the main characters repeatedly
meet. It’s structured like one of those theater pieces designed to
showcase two accomplished actors.

The characters are seeming opposites, exaggerated for dramatic effect.
Thompson plays Nancy Stokes, a retired Catholic schoolteacher who’s
“always been ashamed of my body” and who’s not only never had a
very satisfying sex life, she’s never had an orgasm — at all, not
even while masturbating alone in a room, never, ever. So you already
know what the, shall we say, climactic scene will involve.

It’s not just that the majority of the reviews could’ve been
produced by an automatic text generator. So could the script.

She’s got to play an extremely uptight, anxious, emotionally frozen
person in order to provide the counterpart to McCormack’s Leo
Grande, who’s an angel of sex. He’s a young man who’s literally
unbelievable, he’s so handsome, so gym-toned, so physically at ease,
so understanding, so sweetly appreciative of everyone else’s
far-less-perfect bodies. He’s even got an adorable Irish accent.
He’s the magic sex worker, and as he tells it, he’s so easy to
turn on, he’s never once needed any Viagra or sildenafil equivalent
in his career, not even with his oldest client, who’s eighty-two.

“You’re like some kind of a sex saint,” Nancy says to him at one
point, presumably to relieve the strain on the audience of watching
such an embarrassingly excessive fantasy scenario.

Of course, to balance her extraordinary nervousness and rigidity as
opposed to his apparent openness and self-assurance at the beginning,
there will have to be a shift midway through the film that flips the
power dynamic and reveals he’s not entirely perfect. When Nancy is
both mellowed and emboldened by her sexual experiences with Leo and
begins to pursue greater knowledge of him personally — specifically
about his background, family life, and estrangement from his mother
— he shuts down and becomes anxiously self-protecting in turn. By
the end, both have revealed their real names and fraught family
situations, reaching a point of greater ease and understanding in life
overall. Each has helped the other to a maddeningly equal degree.

Still from Good Luck to You, Leo Grande.

But if you’re at all into noticing things beyond what’s being
pointed at in the film, you can’t help but see that, in spite of the
excellent efforts of the actors, these two people are rather thinly
drawn, each with a few characteristics attached to them that can be
wound up to make the plot go. Because Nancy’s had no erotic pleasure
in her life, she’s been unable to connect with or really love anyone
— husband, children, students — so all she needs is a few
interludes with Leo Grande, the “menopause miracle,” as she calls
him, and it’s indicated that all will be well.

As for Leo, he’s almost entirely defined by his openness to sexual
experience, and all he needs to add is complete honesty about it.
Because his mother caught him in the midst of sensual explorations
with his friends at age fifteen, he was thrown out of the house and
disowned. He reinvented himself, along with a cover story for his
brother about being “an oil rig worker.”

He insists he’s not at all economically exploited and that he does
sex work because he likes it. He’s clearly a person of color, but
that’s never referred to in the film at all, a fact that earns the
film one angry review
[[link removed]], anyway, protesting:

This insistently happy hooker [story] and the question of invisible
blackness. He happens to be black, but this is oddly never discussed
or raised in their endless conversations. Would a clearly conservative
woman show no surprise let alone curiosity, when a hired help of color
knocks on her door in this racially polarized Western society today
[?] . . . Did she request a black man from his agency [?] . . . These
issues remain unanswered let alone unexplored, among many threadbare
plot points.

But the focus of the film’s reception is almost entirely on Emma
Thompson’s overcoming of her hatred of her own body in order to do
the nude scene at the end. She’s making the press junket rounds
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haranguing everyone in her bracing, aunt-like manner about the fact
that it “was actually really brave of me”:

Probably the hardest thing that I’ve ever had to act is standing in
a relaxed manner and looking at my body without judgment. You ask any
woman to do that, I bet you 9.9 times out of 10, they won’t be able
to do it. But do it on camera? Forget it. . . . We’ve been trained
to hate our bodies from very early on because they don’t match the
impossible and actually cruel ideals that we are presented with. . . .
We’re not used to seeing bodies that haven’t been worked on to
such an extent that they’ve become acceptable within the tiny,
narrow limits of body perfection that we have been brainwashed into
wanting, accepting, and receiving.

Again, this is all true enough. But the overall effect of Thompson’s
stern lecturing — and the film’s way of presenting sexual
experimentation for the middle-aged as requiring a smiling sex god of
impossible perfection and endlessly patient effort — seems more
inhibiting than anything.

The film presents sexual experimentation for the middle-aged as
requiring a smiling sex god of impossible perfection and endlessly
patient effort.

There’s a great counterpoint to this film — an episode
of _Absolutely Fabulous_
[[link removed]] called “Sex” from 1995.
The wonderfully scathing British comedy is insightful in its way of
looking straight at aggressive human malefactions as well as endearing
frailties without flinching. Celebrity-obsessed PR maven Edina
“Eddie” Monsoon (Jennifer Saunders) has, like Nancy Stokes, never
had a very satisfactory sex life. She was married twice and “was
rarely troubled” with any great evidence of desire on the part of
her husbands, one of whom eventually came out as gay.

She’s always suffered from an unfortunate body image, seeing herself
as badly overweight, especially compared to her friend, London fashion
magazine editor Patsy Stone (Joanna Lumley), who “hasn’t eaten
since 1973.” Up till then, Patsy worked occasionally as a model in
the stick-thin 1960s heyday of Twiggy and Jean Shrimpton, and even in
middle age, she can rock skintight black leather pants and have
frequent hot encounters with male models and other young showbiz types
who have “buns so tight they’re bouncing off the walls.”

In order to help Edina experience greater sexual freedom, Patsy sets
up a night for them with two male sex workers. But whereas Patsy is so
sexually confident that she can reassure her partner, who’s new to
sex work, with the line, “Don’t worry, you’re in very
experienced hands,” Edina suffers torments of anxiety. She’s
terribly worried about her weight and what she’s wearing, lest she
appear unattractive, though at the same time, she doesn’t want to
seem desperate. Like Nancy Stokes, she’s obsessed with what the sex
worker’s assessment of her will be.

Edina: “I don’t want him to think I’m easy, y’know.”

Patsy: “For God’s sake, Eddie, you’re _paying him_!”

Meanwhile, the young men, whose own sexuality is ambiguous, are very
practically prepped to play their parts well, provided with
“stiffener” in order to ensure satisfactory sexual performances.
They’re not angels or devils, just ordinary people hired to do a
job. And in the end, sex is forgotten when an unforeseen development
creates chaos all around, and everyone joins in on an emergency chase
scene to recover a private tape of young Patsy and Eddie and their
friends at a 1970s orgy that’s fallen into the wrong hands and is
about to be shown in a college classroom.

For Edina, the most embarrassing image in the film is the last one,
showing her fast asleep on the floor in the middle of the action. But
it’s wonderful, too, for the simple reason that it shows sex
doesn’t always have to be such a big deal — having it and not
having it. As Patsy tells her in a convincingly blasé,
pressure-lowering refrain, “It’s just sex, Eddie.”

And though Leo Grande tries to say the same thing to the overanxious
Nancy Stokes — it’s just sex, a totally ordinary activity —
nothing about the film backs it up. The movie itself has a checklist
that’s almost as anxiously prescriptive as Nancy’s list of sexual
acts that must be performed during the session she’s paid for. One
must learn to have a positive body image, and proper orgasms, and
total self-honesty, and long, self-accepting looks at nude flesh in
the mirror, and all the other for-your-own-good behaviors that make
life a little less fun and a little more burdensome every day.

CONTRIBUTORS

Eileen Jones is a film critic at _Jacobin_ and author of _Filmsuck,
USA_. She also hosts a podcast called Filmsuck
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