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Good Luck to You, Leo Grande is a movie about sex. That’s obvious just from its plot summary, which involves a young male escort who goes by Leo Grande (Daryl McCormack), hired by a repressed middle-aged woman named Nancy Stokes (Emma Thompson) so he can bring her to orgasm for the very first time in her life. But across four escort sessions and an hour-and-a-half runtime, Leo Grande explores sex from all sorts of different angles: who’s expected to have it, who’s expected to want it, the way shame curdles into repression, the ways women are taught to fear and despise their own sexuality, the way sex work is stigmatized, the way even well-meaning clients feel entitled to a sex worker’s life, and how some of the greatest pleasure comes from being comfortable in one’s own body. If Leo Grande sometimes has the air of a public service announcement, particularly in its last third, it’s a remarkably thorough and entertaining one, with a performance from Thompson that may well be the best of her storied career.
There are parts of Leo Grande that don’t entirely ring true. The titular escort’s enlightened, almost altruistic attitude towards sex, while charming, feels like a bit of screenwriting convenience, because the film wouldn’t work if he was at all ambivalent towards his job. And while Nancy might be the sort of person to invade Leo’s privacy (unsurprisingly, Leo Grande isn’t his real name), she doesn’t seem like the sort of person who would think that bringing it up with him would do anything but infuriate him. But a film doesn’t have to be perfectly accurate to serve as a corrective, and when it comes right down to it that’s what Leo Grande is. It sets out to counter various stigmas surrounding sex work and older women, and it certainly succeeds there. But along the way, and perhaps without realizing it, Leo Grande also serves as a corrective to our current cultural zeitgeist.
A little over a year ago, a speculative fiction author by the name of Raquel S. Benedict wrote an essay called “Everyone Is Beautiful and No One Is Horny,” where she laments the sexlessness of modern superhero blockbusters. Benedict argues that, despite placing a premium on fit, muscular bodies, the Marvel Cinematic Universe is completely chaste. These heroes are unimaginably beautiful people with bodies like Greek gods, usually clad in tight spandex, and yet even the characters who are supposed to have chemistry with each other numbly trade quips and exposition, not a single spark between them. One could argue that there are exceptions – Tessa Thompson’s Valkyrie, as well as Jeff Goldblum’s Grandmaster, both exude what Benedict describes as “sex-haver energy” — but it’s hard to argue with her point that these heroes’ “perfect bodies exist only for the purpose of inflicting violence upon others.” The sex scene in Eternals, which came out after Benedict’s article and had the charged eroticism of an awkward office fling, proved her point even further.
But it’s not just about superheroes. It’s about the deeply unhealthy relationship we’ve been conditioned to have with our own bodies. Benedict argues that the sexless landscape of pop culture reflects the grim, pointless reality of diet and exercise culture, which demands strict discipline and training to achieve aesthetic beauty more or less for its own sake. Our bodies, then, are not for living or for pleasure, but for some nebulous purpose, to which sex is only a distraction. But even those who don’t do CrossFit try to assign their pleasures and indulgences some sort of function. Eating favorite foods is a reward for discipline elsewhere — hence “cheat day”. Makeup is an expression of one’s own empowerment. Sex is healing, joyous, even radical — an act of resistance, really. But why assign these things such weighty significance when the only reason anyone needs is “it feels good?”
When Nancy Stokes first lets Leo Grande into her anonymously posh hotel room, she’s a knotty tangle of insecurities. She’s reflexively self-deprecating. She’s incredulous at the idea of anyone, least of all someone like Leo, finding her attractive. She feels like a pervert, even a sex predator. She speaks longingly of having an orgasm, but seems resigned to the idea that she’ll never have one. Over the course of her marriage to her late husband, who was so vanilla he didn’t even like receiving oral, her pleasure was completely beside the point, her body a means to an end. Why should it be any different now, even though she’s quite literally paying somebody to bring her pleasure? At the start of the second session, she comes prepared with an actual checklist of sex acts, resolved to get it all done in two hours; she approaches sex like spring-cleaning, something that’s pleasant in theory but is, in practice, just another chore.
As the film goes on, the audience learns more about Nancy, and how she got to be so repressed. She was a religious education teacher, but has none of the direction or purpose in life that religion is supposed to provide. She has two children, a son who bores her and a daughter who frustrates her; she set her dreams and ambitions aside for their sake, and doesn’t want to admit that she resents them for it. Her fondest sexual memory involves a rendezvous with a hotel waiter overlooking the ocean, interrupted by the headlights of a passing car. Time and again, she deferred her desires, judging others for wanting the same thing and judging herself for falling short so many times.
The crux of Leo Grande is not whether Nancy reaches an orgasm by the end, but how she reaches it, and what happens afterwards. The first orgasm of her life — her modest Holy Grail of self-satisfaction, the thing she had wanted for years – doesn’t happen because of anything Leo does to her. In fact, it happens by her own hand, as she watches Leo in the nude searching for a sex toy. Far from an anticlimax, it’s the only way this movie could have ended. Through her orgasm, Nancy learns that sex isn’t inherently shameful, or scary, or perverted — nor is it inherently beautiful and enlightened. She learns that bodies don’t have to be young or sculpted or toned to please somebody. It’s just sex, and just bodies. And, as she admires herself naked in the mirror at the end of the movie, she learns that that’s all it needs to be.
