More about Happy-Go-Lucky
The Upside of Seeing the Bright Side
By Manohla Dargis
New York Times
Excerpt
October 10, 2008
If you know the British filmmaker Mike Leigh's work - early and later titles like "Bleak Moments," "Naked" and "Vera Drake" - you may find yourself watching his most recent movie, "Happy-Go-Lucky," with mounting unease, a tinge of dread. Despite the extraordinary human parade that has passed in front of his lens, laughing and raging, yearning for love and asking for cuddles, Mr. Leigh has never been an artist for whom happy (word or idea) has been an easy fit. Life is sweet, as the title of another of his films puts it with a heart-swelling yes, but it's also an eternal fight against doom and gloom, the soul-crushing no.
The push and pull between yes and no animates all of his work, investing it with narrative tension and a sense of artistic purpose that is, whether overtly articulated or not, also insistently, vigorously left-leaning. The hard-working and often besieged characters who populate his stories live in worlds partly defined, if not wholly circumscribed, by ideology and the state. Nobody mounts a soapbox or whistles "The Internationale" in "Happy-Go-Lucky," but the film is so closely tuned to the pulse of communal life, to the rhythms of how people work, play and struggle together, it captures the larger picture along with the smaller. Like Poppy, the bright focus of this expansive, moving film, Mr. Leigh isn't one to go it alone.
Played by a glorious Sally Hawkins - a gurgling, burbling stream of gasps, giggles and words - Poppy rides into "Happy-Go-Lucky" on a bicycle, with daytime London and the film's opening credits slipping past her. She looks lost in thought (not lost) and wonderfully content. The bike soon goes missing ("We didn't even get a chance to say goodbye," she murmurs), but Poppy keeps moving forward and dancing and jumping and laughing and nodding her dark, delicate head as if she were agreeing not just with this or that friend but also with life itself. She's altogether charming or perhaps maddening ? much depends on whether you wear rose-colored specs ? recognizably human and every inch a calculated work of art...
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