Editor’s Note: Vanyaland Film Editor Nick Johnston is here in Boston, but his heart is in Utah as he remotely covers the 2022 Sundance Film Festival. This year’s Sundance is a virtual edition, but that’s not stopping the film premieres from flowing. Check out our official Sundance preview, scan through all our Sundance 2022 reviews as they are published, and check out our full archives of past festivals.
Pardon the mid-grade reference to a probably well out-of-date meme, but watching Sophie Hyde’s Good Luck to You, Leo Grande had me feeling like Gordon Ramsey — finally, some good fucking quarantine cinema. It’s pretty easy to see the COVID-era limitations of this production: Very few people are on screen at once — indeed, for much of the runtime, it’s just two humans connecting in a small hotel room — and city scenes that might have once been filled with humble pedestrians or coffee shops full of patrons at work and play are, to say it plainly, totally missing. Yet unlike most of its Quarantinema counterparts, Leo Grande isn’t about the fucking pandemic, and instead is, perhaps, the kind of project that we should have been making this entire time: A small-scale drama deep-diving into an under-discussed-yet-still-relevant issue through a kind of dialectical fiction, which uses its limitations to present a kind of intimacy, both physical and emotional, that’s uncommon in most semi-mainstream cinema. If there is to be a broad populist hit to emerge from this year’s Sundance, outside of the genre categories, it would most likely be this one.
Penned by English comic Katy Brand, Good Luck to You, Leo Grande is a two-hander about sex work, essentially functioning as a dialogue about the ethics and realities of the trade while making a lengthy (and compelling) case for its legalization. That’s not to say that it’s academic in its manner: It’s still a funny and occasionally biting character portrait, mainly in how it interrogates the values of Nancy Stokes (Emma Thompson), a widow and longtime religious studies teacher at secondary schools around England, who has found herself, for reasons that will only become clear to her over time, in a hotel room with a young man named Leo Grande (Daryl McCormack). Grande’s a sex worker, high-class and well-mannered, and a particularly caring and considerate one: it is clear to him within minutes that she is very uncomfortable to be there, as she attempts to deflect and rationalize her desires while engaging in the kind of ego death reserved exclusively for the mid-life crisis. She doesn’t even really think that sex work should be legal, given all of its perceived harms, and yet, she’s still in the room, being charmed and seduced by this young man, who is nurturing some wounds of his own, though heavy concealed from her view. What’s interesting is how Brand focuses on the dilemma of the client, rather than making it a concern-troll about what this young man is doing with his life: It’s clear that he’s in a career that he’s happy with, no matter what Nancy might think, and this perspective complicates the drama in a number of interesting and innovative ways.
Per usual, Thompson is dynamite, playing up the line between prudish schoolmarm and flesh-hungry horndog and how these dueling attitudes fight it out within her, and McCormack, best known for his work on Peaky Blinders and The Wheel of Time, makes a swell intro to what should be a larger mainstream audience. He’s sweet and charming while being appropriately sexy and emotional when he needs to be, becoming something far more interesting than the typical depiction of a sex worker that we see on-screen. Plus, it feels cinematic: Hyde’s direction, the particular wordiness of Brand’s screenplay, and, well, the explicit nature of the content within the film itself prevent one from feeling like the project should have been stage-bound, as so many of the single-location small-group projects occasionally do. There’s a kind of intimacy to cinema that’s often neglected by critics when demanding that play-like films get out of their medium of choice — unbound by an audience and their reactions, a filmmaker can delve deeper into moments of true emotional instability and get through rapid-fire conversations without having to pause for the sake of the audience. Here, Thompson and McCormack are just allowed to exist with one another, and Hyde’s pacing enables the characters to take their time to change their minds about each other and the situation at large. Perhaps this is the exception that proves the rule, but I am starting to wonder if we’re so uncomfortable with small-scale emotional intimacy on screen that we demand it be purged to the stage if it isn’t appropriately cinematic.
The other, and of course, more important aspect of Leo Grande is that it’s a message film, which comes with the traditional caveats: There will be plenty of people for whom this is preaching to the choir, or for who this does not go far enough for in its advocacy for sex workers, or who are frustrated that it doesn’t enlighten them any further than they already have themselves. Call it the Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner effect, where a message movie happens to speak to moderates, or simply the less politically engaged, and that may engender some form of a backlash. Given how unfairly tertiary the concerns of sex workers are to many — these, again, are people whose careers are often jokingly referred to as “the world’s oldest profession” yet face criminal punishment and social ostracization for trying to do a job that has existed in every single society throughout history without any sort of protection — perhaps this can be avoided simply by the novelty of it, though I wouldn’t put it past members of our discourse to find something dumb to get angry about here. But one should never forget how essential these kinds of middlebrow movies are in shaping attitudes, and how rarely they are this entertaining.