Happy-Go-Lucky

Tuesday saw me heading back to my favorite model city, Waltham, to catch showings of two movies that had been on my list for weeks, but which had eluded me. Both are about young women, and it seemed natural to see them both on the same day.

First up, Happy-Go-Lucky. Mike Leigh directs Sally Hawkins as "Poppy," a 30-year-old English schoolteacher who lives in South London. In the first scene of the movie, we see her floating down the street on her bicycle, smiling at all the world as if radiating her own buoyant state to everyone around her. We establish that she is not easily thrown off her mood. A grumpy unresponsive male bookstore clerk does not shake her mood at all. Nor does the theft of her bicycle, which elicits only a wistful "I didn't even get the chance to say good-bye."

The movie is essentially an extended character sketch in the female spirit. The protagonist is the embodiment of a certain kind of girlish happiness that is the province of women alone. On some level, she is innocent---although we know this is not literally true, but symbolic.

Nevertheless the movie can be about only one thing: the inevitable challenges that will confront her happy state. By what manner will these challenges arise? Will they topple her out of her happiness? Will she fall out of grace?

The story surprised me by its cleverness in how it confronts the heroine. In a lesser Hollywood-type story, she would suffer some kind of catastrophic downfall, through bad decisions, bad luck, or sabotage. Instead Poppy is confronting by a different and potential more sinister assault, in the form of a steady drip-drip of exposure to sad, troubled, and angry people. Individually they are not sufficient to break her spirit, but cumulatively, they begin to take their toll upon her.

The plot is driven by the bicycle theft at the beginning of the movie, leading her to undertake driving lessons from a raging angry instructor who literally invokes the name of a fallen angel over and over as he shouts at her to remember to check her rear-view mirror.

She also meets a female flamenco instructor who uses her sorrow and rage at her lover's infidelity as a teaching tool. One of her students turns out to be a bully, and she is driven to understand why, in order to help save him.

Inevitably the loss of "innocence" through exposure to the world outside her mood-bubble will have the side effect of her finding love. This is the archetypal path of womanhood in narrative---mature love comes at the price of abandoning girlish innocence.

Or does it really? To what degree must this be true? Perhaps worldly exposure is necessary, but the spirit can remain unbroken? This is the essential question of the movie. The overall verdict is foreshadowed near the opening of the movie, when Poppy is on a bus which is pitching and stopping in traffic. She is holding a metal pole, bent slightly sideways by the lurching of the bus, but smiling as she keeps her poise amidst the crowd. The last shot of the movie seals the deal, and says everything about her resilient buoyancy.