Happy Go Lucky

Happy Go Lucky bursts onto the screen, elbowing the credits to the side. It opens with tracking shots of a long-skirted young woman riding a bicycle through labyrinthine contemporary London, her eyes bouncing off the built environment like a sliver of sunlight in a dark forest. She’s an adult experiencing the child's pure delight of balancing on rolling wheels, the terrestrial creature’s close encounter with flight.

Still in the credits, the woman parks her bike, runs an errand and returns to find her bike boosted. After peering quizzically up street and down, as most of us would, her lower lip cantilevers out to the right and the first of a series of self-amused wisecracks bubble out of her mouth. If she feels sad or angry at having her bike ripped off, we never know it. It’s not clear whether she does either. Some Alice in Wonderland process kicks in for her, draining gravity from trouble so it seems absurd or inconsequential. She literally skips away from the scene of the crime as if she is still astride the now phantom two wheeler.

Her name is Pauline but everyone calls her Poppy. She inhabits the psychological realm somewhere north of Eliza Doolittle’s winning cheek and south of Mary Poppins’ logical positivism, wardrobe courtesy of Annie Hall. In the ‘60’s she would have been Georgy Girl or a flower child dancing in the moon shadows. Here she’s a 30 year old primary school teacher, played by the excellent Sally Hawkins, who comes across as a more tomboyish Ann Hathaway with her appealing, wide-eyed effervescence.

Outside school, Poppy has a very cheeky but affectionate relationship with almost everyone, but her connection with Zoe (Alexis Zegerman), her roommate, is built on firmer foundations of understanding and trust. (Initially, I thought Zoe, who is about Poppy’s age but looks older, was Poppy’s mother) Poppy’s defiantly acerbic sister and another female friend studying to be a lawyer round out Poppy’s inner circle. The gals are all single and in varying stages of coping with that. Except for Poppy, none are fulfilled in their work. As a group, they’re tight in the way the boys were in Diner, townies who have lost the will to move on but not yet the dream.

The camera right floats in the middle of the action during the several Ya-Ya Sisterhood scenes early in the film. It feels almost like a documentary about female bonding. I felt a bit voyeuristic, like I wasn’t supposed to be there, but thought that women would probably love these scenes. My wife Myrna told me that she thought it looked like a man trying to show what womens' intimacy was like. You’d think Mars would already know that about Venus. My favorite segment was where the ladies dissolve repeatedly in hysterical laughter while comparing the size, shape and appeal of each other’s breasts. To be honest, it had never occurred to me before that tits were funny. It’s a life changing experience to be sure, but here, at last, I think modernity has gone too far.

In the classroom Poppy has a real enthusiasm for educating her students and a talent for getting down with them. This is where she lives most fully, the boundaries between adult and child vanishing into freedom. One scene has her strutting around her class room in a home-made chicken mask, flapping her wings and crowing, reveling in the activity well beyond the statute of limitations for even playful adults. For Poppy the lessons about how the world works are really lessons in how to be happy in the world. She transforms the most mundane instruction, such as the commuting distances for migratory birds, into odes to wonder and joy. And what an ode her performance is to teachers, those dedicated, creative, loving folks who teach our young people to be human beings!

Ultimately, alas, Poppy encounters people who aren’t so happy go lucky. The film pivots on a scene when she sees one of her students angrily wrestling another boy to the ground. Here, for the first time in the film, Poppy is not able to bubble, charm or fix this bump in the grind of human existence, the indelible rites of competition, jealousy and anger.

Mike Leigh’s narrative arc for the subsequent education of Ms. Poppy was a tush-squirmer for me. There’s something about his diffusive, almost watery style that kept me from engaging enough to suspend disbelief. That said, the scenes with her driving instructor (Eddie Marson), alternately a raging lunatic and a buttoned-down Brit, were quite vivid, both Monty Python funny and Taxi Driver scary. I was truly on edge, dreading that this lovely, totally harmless woman-child would be savagely attacked and/or brutalized by this man.

Ditto Poppy’s attempts, in a back alley way after midnight, to reach out to a very large, verbally dexterous and vaguely dangerous homeless man (Trevor Cooper, who looked to me like Stanley Kubric doing a spoof on Invasion of the Body Snatchers).

In the end, Mike Leigh takes pains to make the medicine go gently down poor Poppy’s throat. She learns that she can’t make everyone happy and doesn’t have to. And, lo, a very nice guy shows up who adores her just the way she is. The film ends with a beautiful aerial zoom out of Poppy and Zoe in a row boat on a summer lake. Poppy is talking to her new beau on her cell phone, giggly and squealing as ever, a silly Zen master of the eternal moment no matter what form it takes.