Happy Go Lucky

In which a cheerful, sometimes obtuse, young female primary school teacher takes driving lessons with a rage-ridden instructor, helps a child in need, and ultimately finds her Prince Charming.

All I knew was that in Happy Go Lucky,  Mike Leigh had come up with this truly repellant character that made people want to gouge her eyes out or spit on the ground with disgust, because she was too damn happy. I put off seeing it, although I was intrigued. Then Nancy asked me to write about it.

So I watched the IMDb trailer first and saw as cloying a scene as I could recall, though every millimeter a Mike Leigh joint, with Poppy (Sally Hawkins) in a fabulously fake-y fifties-style flirtation with the handsome and equally fake Tim (Samuel Roukin). Not auspicious.

But as I read the IMDb responses to this film, overwhelmingly negative, complaining about this horrible female character, who wasn’t nearly as good as Amelie (!) I realized Leigh was performing one of his infamous experiments pushing the boundaries of dramatic art. Audiences generally despise such efforts, which do not allow them the comfort of entertainment and require a bit more reflection–in this case, probing one’s own self-hood, to which the Average American responds, fuck off, please pass the Paxil. It is amusing to read the responses to Happy Go Lucky and then compare them to the letters written in response to Naked, which he made in ’93 about a (male) character who was the diametrical opposite to Poppy, the dark and maniacal Johnny, meandering through the broken world of Thatcher-era London. Where Johnny suffers, and speaks in a tortured and strange poetry, Poppy seems to be immune to suffering and speaks entirely in silly jokes and cliches. Too bad for her us. The letters in response to Naked describe it as brilliant, a work of genius. The letters about Happy Go Lucky seem to be from a different ilk of film goers altogether, angry philistines who were affronted by a film that did not satisfy their expectations. One notable exception is “willywilly” who writes, “I think this is quite an unusual film. What usually happens with unusual films is that distributors misrepresent them as something familiar that they know how to sell and audiences know how to be sold on. I think it’s not about Poppy and an example of human nature. I think Poppy is a ‘what if’ construct designed to goad the characters around her and show how people attach to and identify with their unhappiness. Leigh has described the film as ‘anti-miserabilist’. So it’s actually about misery – and an attack on misery. Poppy is the assault. And miserable people get angry. “

To see Happy Go Lucky is not a movie-watching experience. It is a fascinating ride through a filmic funhouse of 60′s musical comedy tropes, TV sitcom muzak and Doris Day/Julie Andrews archetypes. You can feel the puppetmaster’s hand pushing personal buttons you may not want to have pushed. And Poppy is the puppet. Your irritation and impatience with her are an unsettling creep over the fourth wall that separates us from those on that stage, whom we prefer to see suffer like Hamlet or Oedipus, not to cluck and shrug, “Well I didn’t get a chance to say goodbye” when her bike is stolen. Watching the Poppy in her idiot bliss is a true deconstruction of character and its function in drama. In Happy Go Lucky we ask WHY more than in any film in recent memory…why am I envious, why resentful, why so irritated, why angry, why intolerant, why uncompassionate. What is the nature of compassion and how does it figure into drama (yes, this film is ultimately a drama, not a comedy). These are questions which bounce back quick as a mirror image at us from her, her quirks, her giggles, her Shirley MacLaine grin. She is a character who is the inverse of the acutely pain-ridden Johnny of Naked. Yet hers is a world of pain, suffering and anger, through which she strolls like a child in the zoo, and all to our horror, which gives way to bemusement, or maybe not. Because this film is experimental in the most essential sense, positing a character and then seeing what falls around it and how that lays, this film is deeply foreign to the Hollywood culture industry for whom questions are out of the question. To say that Poppy is a cipher is something of an oversimplification. She is a foil in the figurative sense, and also in the literal sense, poking some of her playmates to respond/reveal, as “willywilly” notes. One of the many masterful scenes in the film has Poppy wriggling her way into a crowded bus and giggling with an indecorous joy. Leigh’s camera captures the faces of the extras responding, a man who smiles generously, others who scowl. We cringe, fearful of what she might provoke from what we know to be a cruel world. Do we want her to be punched in the face? Or are we afraid for her, afraid of what her behavior might provoke? Indeed, what does it provoke in us? Ultimately, Mike Leigh does intercede. The film is structured around her driving lessons with Scott, (Eddie Marsan) who chews the furniture to splinters with his depiction of a cartoon bigot whose hots for Poppy ignite the climactic explosion. Leigh pours into this explosion all that you’ve been waiting for. But there’s a Poppy Ending.