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Happy go lucky's Poppy (Sally Hawkins)

Happy-Go-Lucky

The unbearable lightness of being Poppy

Friday, May 09, 2008

Old misery guts Mike Leigh doing happy clappy? Noel McAdam just had to take a closer look ...

(15, 118 mins)

Sally Hawkins, Eddie Marsan, Alexis Zegerman, Samuel Roukin, Kate O'Flynn

Cripes! So Mike Leigh isn't such a miserable bugger after all. Who'd have thought it?

For years he's dealt in the bits of life most people expend their energy repressing: family dysfunction in Secrets and Lies, back-street abortion in Vera Drake.

Now, if you listen to the hype, he's suddenly gone all upbeat, happy-clappy, ready to grab a tambourine and head for an airport.

But the truth is a bit more complicated. Leigh has always mined a rich seam of humour, often black, sometimes bleak, as far back as Abigail's Party and Nuts in May, so that comedy is never very far from tragedy.

Under the veneer of a more optimistic world view, Happy-Go-Lucky is a variation on the usual Mike Leigh mix.

Primary school teacher Poppy (a superb performance from Hawkins, who was also in Vera Drake) is such a persistently positive person she can be irritating. She's not avoiding reality, just doing a good job of working round it. Nothing gets her down. Even when her bike is stolen she's as much amused as annoyed.

"You can't make everybody happy," her flatmate tells her. " Well," says Poppy (actual name Pauline) "there's no harm in trying. "

And, relentlessly pragmatic, she immediately takes up driving lessons. Instructor Scott (Marsan, who was in Vera Drake too) is her mirror opposite: moody, angry. He's taking the sessions, but Poppy is in the driving seat, giving life lessons.

As their relationship develops, Marsan showing a vile racism, you are aware that most of us are probably most of the time somewhere in between the Poppy-Scott extremes.

Like Popeye, Poppy's attitude is 'I am what I am': she's strong to the finish. Though men for the most part are oddly absent and she and her mates get plastered and compare cleavages, Poppy is not an airhead.

They discuss the kids who spend their weekends in front of various screens and education systems aimed at preventing thinking outside the box. Scott, for example, preaches against becoming a left-side-of-the-brain " prisoner".

Some scenes are genuinely moving — how the school and a social worker (Roukin) join forces to reach out and help a violent pupil ("you've got to love them, ain't ya," says Poppy) — but others, like her rows with Scott, are mostly tiresome and one — in which Poppy approaches a shaggy tramp in a derelict factory (asking herself "what am I doing?" while going further into the darkness with him) — is totally unconvincing.

Unusually for Leigh in this project, he appears to have developed a script and relied less than usual on improvisation to develop the characters. He should, however, have spent more time developing a story, for there is a noticeable lack of narrative and for long periods the film appears to drift, as aimlessly as Poppy's approach to life. And while Leigh is not indicating he has nothing to say — how to become and act like a grown-up is among the major themes — there are some sequences, such as an extended flamenco dancing class, which are played purely for laughs.

But even when Leigh does cliche — "we make our own happiness in life" — there is a fair amount of irony added.

Not least, perhaps, that — particularly in the week that Boris became Mayor — London has rarely looked so well on film; clean, inviting, not grimy at all. But the place exists for the people, here, not the other way around.

You've slipped through the net, someone tells Poppy, but she demurs. I am the net, she says.

Yet even pretty, smart and kind Poppy, whose optimism is finally infectious and life-affirming, cannot save everyone. Life has a way of crashing through.

And even this most cheerful addition to the magnificent Leigh canon can't prevent the underlying darkness showing through.

Showing exclusively at the Queen's Film Theatre, Belfast, from tonight.