Film

Good Luck to You, Leo Grande: Thompson shines in a story of frustrated sexuality

The veteran actress is compulsively watchable as a middle-aged former schoolteacher in Sophie Hyde’s new film

Daryl McCormack and Emma Thompson in Good Luck to You, Leo Grande: a heartfelt comedy drama about a former schoolteacher who hires a young sex worker to help expand her vocabulary of carnal experience

Rising Irish actor Daryl McCormack goes toe to toe with the veteran Emma Thompson in Good Luck to You, Leo Grande, a heartfelt and compassionate comedy drama about a mature former schoolteacher who hires a strapping young sex worker to help expand her vocabulary of carnal experience. Written by Katy Brand and directed by Sophie Hyde, it depicts the often painful process of coming to terms with yourself in middle age, revealing the loneliness and confusion that women can be left with after fulfilling their societal duties as wives and mothers.

Thompson plays Nancy, a recently widowed and retired woman in her 60s who has never experienced an orgasm. With characteristic matter-of-factness, she sets herself the task of claiming this sensual pleasure and engages Leo (McCormack, in what will surely be a breakthrough role). Impossibly handsome, smart and articulate, he is also a professional in these matters – confident, unhurried and self-assured. She’s a bag of nerves.

The two get to know one another over the course of four meetings in a sterile corporate hotel bedroom. They tease out intimacies that go beyond the transactional nature of their relationship and towards something more revealing. Displaying her teacher’s need for facts and detail, Nancy tells Leo all about her dull marriage, her disappointing children (neither of whom she is especially close to) and her frustrations with herself as she enters the third phase of her life.

Initially deeply uncomfortable but willing herself to lose her inhibitions, her sexual awakening is slow in arriving. Yet Leo is in no hurry. He has already been paid, after all. And what to make of this serene young man? He remains a smiling mystery for much of the running time. Even his name is fake, but then, we discover, so is Nancy’s.

Limited to its bedroom setting with a brief foray into an otherwise empty restaurant, Leo Grande would feel impossibly stage-bound if it weren’t for Brand and Hyde’s curiosity. Thompson and McCormack deliver subtle, generous performances, and while the younger actor struggles to generate conflict in a slightly underwritten part, Thompson gives a spiky reading of a complicated and not entirely likeable character. The more she relaxes around the charismatic Leo, the more her reactionary ideas about the younger generation are exposed.

Thompson has always been drawn to playing and writing about characters who are in the process of getting what they think they want, but then reassess their desire. Nancy is a kind of inverse of the free-spirited nurse who had raucous sex with Jeff Goldblum in The Tall Guy 30 years ago, or the woman who cries secret tears in Love Actually when she discovers her husband is a cheat. Knowing this ground intimately, Thompson is a fascinating and courageous guide.

Sophie Marceau and André Dussollier in Everything Went Fine

Moving from the pitfalls of sex to the inevitabilities of death, we arrive at François Ozon’s startlingly frank and moving family drama Everything Went Fine. It’s based on a memoir by his late writing partner Emmanuèle Bernheim, who wrote the screenplays for Swimming Pool and 5x2, and is played here by Sophie Marceau.

The film opens with Emmanuèle receiving a phone call to say her 84-year-old father André (André Dussollier) has suffered a stroke. Rushing to his bedside, she meets her sister Pascale (Géraldine Pailhas) and finds their dad clinging to life, struggling to speak about wills and arrangements.

When they next visit, their estranged mother Claude (Ozon regular Charlotte Rampling), herself suffering the effects of Parkinson’s disease, is looming over their father like a crow on a headstone. The atmosphere is chilly, and that’s before an improving André privately asks for Emmanuèle’s assistance in arranging his transport to Switzerland where he intends to end his own life at an assisted suicide facility.

Emmanuèle’s contact is a soft-spoken German woman (Hanna Schygulla), a former judge who explains the procedure with tenderness and humanity. There are complications, however, physical, historical, and metaphysical. While Ozon maintains a measured tone throughout, his characters are perhaps a little too sophisticated, too elegant and too French when dealing with such a radical request.

Still, after years of relative inactivity, it’s a pleasure to see Marceau tackle a significant role. She gives Emmanuèle a steely and stirring pragmatism while scything through a thicket of family resentments to reach a compassionate goal.

Good Luck to You, Leo Grande, directed by Sophie Hyde, nationwide, 16. Rating: ***. Everything Went Fine, directed by François Ozon, selected, 12A. Rating: ***

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