Cast: Sally Hawkins, Eddie Marsan

Director: Mike Leigh

Screenplay: Mike Leigh

Running time: 1 hr 58 mins

Genre: Comedy/Drama



CRITIQUE:


In the contemporary comedy arena of Hollywood, anything that comes out gold is either a quirky indie or a Judd-Apatow-baby. All the rest are either crappy remakes or misfired slapstick. However a step outside the borderlines and you’ll find gems in the British soil (Stateside shithole spoofs should learn from HOT FUZZ). And so far this year, there is SON OF RAMBOW, one of the best indies to have emerged the ring yet. Another is a much smaller, nevertheless quirky, film of smiles, Mike Leigh’s HAPPY-GO-LUCKY. To greater effect, Sally Hawkins, the main lead, already snared the Best Actress nod from Berlin Film Festival.


Like most character films, plot is sidestepped to make way for the development of the central character. Leigh focuses his storyline angle to this London schoolteacher Poppy, whose attitude in everyday life is so jolly and bubbly that would make the rest of us look miserable and suicidal. As the title goes, she faces life’s foibles with a smile and an amusing comment, may it be a patronising bookshop retailer, a difficult flamenco dance, a school kid bully, and an all-hating, diatribe-spitting driving instructor – and even when she discovers her bike stolen, all she sighed was “I didn’t even get the chance to say goodbye.”


Yet with the character’s stance (Sally Hawkins with a remarkable performance), it stays in the realm of realism. Except that odd encounter with a vagrant, that is. We think of Poppy as a misinformed, undereducated tart roaming the London streets with an innocent sunshine-like grin, who has probably never discovered the evils of the world. But as soon as the film goes deeper into her psyche, most especially in the scenes where she helps one of the kids in her class from family problems, and her driving lessons scenes (where dialogue of the characters plays like a ball in a tennis court, being rapidly fired back and forth), we learn there’s an emotional depth somewhere. She knew what was it like being bullied, misunderstood and ill-judged, and yet she grows up and look at them with a smile. If I’d be near Poppy, I’d give her a great hug.



VERDICT:

This is an offbeat, uplifting comedy from a filmmaker whose movies are about depressing human situations. Once you peer through the absence of plot, you’ll see a blast of energy in the central character that would challenge a gallon of Lucozade. We wish we could face tribulations with a smile, Poppy-style.



RATING: B+