Happy-Go-Lucky

Although the title makes an obvious allusion to the demonstrated personality and approach to life of Poppy, the principal character, this piece is not quite a straightforward character study. Rather the film’s events are anchored around this character, a primary-school teacher in present-day London. These events are decidedly of the mundane variety, a series of Poppy’s driving lessons being the princpal binding thread of the plot-line, such as it is.

Poppy, often in the company of her close friends, deals with the challenges of existence with a naïve idealism that seems to be founded on the principle that all problems can be solved by talking about them. In the context of the film, the persuasiveness of this principle is well-presented but, given Poppy’s occasionally overwhelming joie-de-vivre, not everyone in the audience will warm to her. A case in point is the series of scenes set at a flamenco class Poppy has joined. Here her highly mobile facial expressions are simply too much to take, her smile too broad and constant, her eyes too animated. Ironically, the sole character that suggests to Poppy that her behaviour betrays a lack of focus is her driving instructor. His is a character vividly presented, and is in many ways a tormented soul, and not only because he has to deal with the firecracker Poppy on a weekly basis. He quickly turns out to be an unsympathetic character, although for more deeply serious reasons simply than not being one’s cup of tea, as could be the case with Poppy.

Poppy is not an out-and-out ingenue, and she comments that life is sometimes difficult, which, she admits, is “all part of it”. However, the mood of the film is almost uniformly light and humorous, so much so that as the events roll on we increasingly wonder whether we are being set up for a fall. There is nothing wrong per se with establishing and maintaining a mood, without dramatic modulation and emotional manipulation, but Leigh doesn’t go that way here, and eventually the crisis that our understanding of how dramas usually work had led us to expect, does transpire.

Features of modern life are to the forefront, in which regard characters say things like “text me later”, and “I want my daughter to go on a gap year before Uni”. The landscape of the film is London, notably the locales of Camden Lock and Finsbury Park Road, where Poppy lives, and the Southwark Council are thanked in the film’s credits. The characters are almost always the predominant feature of the scene, and only on one occasion, when Poppy is walking through a garden, plants swaying impressively in the breeze, does it seem that the director is concerned with the aesthetic of the landscape.

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