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In the by-turns piercing and touching Good Luck to You, Leo Grande, Emma Thompson plays Nancy, a religious-education teacher of about 55. As the film opens, she’s finally chasing after something that’s eluded her her whole life: experiencing real sexual pleasure. Her longtime husband — with whom she never had anything but perfunctory, his-pleasure-first sex — died recently. Shortly after his passing, Nancy decided, with single life idling in front of her, that she would never again fake an orgasm — and also that the minimal positions defining her predictably vanilla sex life weren’t going to have the final experiential word.

After much deliberation, Nancy hires a hunky 20-something-year-old sex worker who calls himself Leo Grande (Daryl McCormack) to satisfy both ambitions. “This is it — my final attempt at life,” she half-jokingly tells him. She’s rented a sleek and expensive hotel room for their first rendezvous. At first, she comes close to backing out. She can’t get out of her head. What would her students and two grown children think? Is she being exploitative by paying for sex? And is it silly, at her age, to want something like this? A cool professional with probing green eyes and patience for miles, Leo assures her that nobody has to know; he’s a sex worker by choice, not tragic story-backed force; and that it’s actually sillier to minimize your desire just because society thinks you shouldn’t have any after reaching a certain age. 

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