Good Luck to You, Leo Grande: It’s not everything you wanted to know about sex

Who would break a butterfly upon a wheel? Who would be snide about a well-intended comedy that brings together charming Daryl McCormack, Nenagh’s finest, and the deservedly celebrated Dame Emma Thompson? Who would say a word against a project that dares to put sexagenarian sexuality at its centre? Who?

Well, I’ll give it a go. There is plenty to enjoy in Good Luck to You, Leo Grande, but the darn thing seems awfully proud of its supposed braveness. Yes, this claustrophobic chamber piece travels to places shunned by the everyday comedy. Before the close, Thompson presents her naked body to the camera with a relaxed pride that deserves congratulatory cheers. Hollywood would rather gouge out an older person’s innards than linger on their perfectly handsome outer shell. But Leo Grande remains oddly coy about the sexual act. In a very British fashion, eroticism is undercut by constant embarrassed comedy. The nation hasn’t moved quite so far from Carry On as the film pretends.

Thompson plays Nancy, a retired, recently widowed RE teacher who, breaking implausibly sharply with the mores of a lifetime, decides to hire a top-end sex worker for an afternoon of headboard-rattling bliss. She could hardly have done better than Leo Grande. Entering in the muscular form of McCormack, he proves as effortlessly charming as he is erotically creative.

What follows is, frankly, a play. Indeed, Thompson’s nude scene and some brief copulation notwithstanding, Katy Brand’s screenplay — a characteristic pandemic production — would require little alteration to serve time on the radio. It’s not just that we remain in the same room for most of the piece. The conversation has the abstracted quality you so often encounter in the 30-seater studio above the Red Lion and so rarely meet in the cinema (or real life for that matter). The hotel-room door has barely closed before Nancy is expressing her reservations and Leo is sinuously deflecting them.

Thompson is stuck with the sort of handbaggy Silly Billy that, after so much practice, she could manage convincingly if placed in a coma. “I feel like a seedy old perve,” she says in one of her better speeches. “I feel like Rolf Harris.” We are closer to Hyacinth Bucket than to anything from Pinter. In contrast, Leo is absurdly decent, articulate, understanding and patient. There is, of course, no reason a sex worker should not be all these things. (“This is not a job for clever people?” Leo says questioningly when Nancy admires his vocabulary.) It’s just that few humans outside the New Testament have exhibited those attributes in such staggering abundance. When Nancy wonders if he is “some sort of sex saint” we feel the screenplay doubting itself. “Are you real?” she continues. Fair question.

For a film that appears to be arguing the sex-positive case, Good Luck to You, Leo Grande works awfully hard to avoid scenes of certified copulation. They talk about their sexual plans in PG language. They chew over past erotic disappointments. But the full-on coupling has to hang on for a penultimate, sheet-clutching montage that feels nailed-on out of grim duty. It might have been better not to bother at all than to go through the expected motions in such perfunctory fashion.

And yet. As directed by Sophie Hyde, who made the recent Irish film Animals, the picture never fully collapses beneath its own compromises. Credit for that must go to Thompson and McCormack. You get a sense of actors from different generations relishing the opportunity to tug at the ragged screenplay like handsome dogs squabbling over an old blanket. The connection between them is palpable. The comic timing is sharp as steak knives. One longs to see them get together again with better material.