Happy-go-lucky - Mike Leigh (2008) - A film protocol-cum-review.

 

Impish Poppy rides into town modeling openness. Either she has not been in it before or she's forgotten. Enchanted with the world, and her own enchantment, she discovers novelty at very turn. When life conspires to throw the odd bit of nastiness her way, she deflects it with alacrity. In a bookseller she attempts small talk with a taciturn clerk who refuses to be implicated by her chatty solicitude. Exiting after a final attempt to compel reciprocity, she quips: “I ain’t nicked nothin'. Honest, guv’nor.” Even when her bicycle goes missing she can only blithely regret not having had the chance to say good-bye.

Indiscriminately agreeable, Poppy is comfortable with the spectrum of ethnicities. (Only neurotics are intolerant; "healthy" types indiscriminately inclusive.) She covers her students' heads with paper bags and encourages them to crow and flap their wings. It's all about spontaneity. Main thing--no one takes themselves too seriously. Could lead to disagreeableness.

A sequence where she bounces on a trampoline drives home her preternatural levity.

At their first lesson instructor Scott is all business. From the unconsumated introductory hand-shake it's obvious theirs will be a relationship of failed reciprocity.  

Dyspeptic Scott has no time for flaky friskiness, deploying his ‘pig parent’ ego state with a vehemence bordering on caricature. He does everything in his power to deflate Poppy's irrepressible ebullience. If there is any doubt with whom our sympathy should lie--Scott's teeth are yellow and misaligned.

Juxtaposing temperaments is Leigh's specialty, but pitting choleric Scott against sanguine Poppy really ups the dispositional ante. If the distinct hue of each character in his dramatic quilt lends their conflicts a certain inevitability, it also makes them feel--for all their specificity of milieu and motivation--feel almost allegorical. Leigh is not just staging friction between antipathetic personalities, but a full-on civil-war between ideological factions: the poster-child of inclusive egalitarianism vs. the clannish defender of the Realm-under-siege. By embodying political orientations in personality types, he offers both an etiology and critique of their respective angles on the world. Though it's never less than obvious with whom his ultimate sympathy--and that of any card-carrying progressive--must lie.

Having revealed herself as a simple primary school teacher, Poppy asks Scott if he's a Satanist. “No," he replies, "in fact I’m exactly the opposite.” “Are you the Pope, then?” she guffaws. “That’s the same thing!” he snorts. The exchange suggests that for all their disparate ideological commitments, they are each, at heart, ideological brawlers well-versed in trading intellectual clichés.

After the lesson she tells her room-mate her instructor was a funny sort: “a bit uptight.” Lacking Poppy's rose-colored perspective we know him as the force of pure evil. Her understatement gives us pause to admire the magnanimity of her unfailingly affirmative attitude. Even as we secretly desire to see her resilience put to the severest of tests.

Poppy visits a chiropractor—a huge African who releases a joint jammed during trampoline practice. Poppy's sense of common humanity doesn’t miss a beat. Leigh frames the scene in such a way as to compel recognition of this 'self-explanatory' fact by, paradoxically, emphasizing his disorienting foreignness.

Scott complains about a rude student who'd been “over-indulged and encouraged to express himselfe," with with whom he had a confrontation. 

Seeing two African men pass on bicycles he tells Poppy to lock her door. “Are you taking the piss?” she protests. (Only paranoid types are wary of males of North African extraction.)

Scott can’t believe Poppy is a primary school teacher, seething: “You have no respect for order. You are arrogant, you are disruptive, and you celebrate chaos.”

From the perspective of Scott’s fear of encroaching social dissolution, Poppy’s light-heartedness seems reprehensibly oblivious. If suffering “is the modality of taking the world seriously” (E. Cioran), her will-to-good-cheer largely obviates it's assumption of any consequence. Life is an endlessly amusing curiosity. Her glibly engaged disengagement keeping all options in play as so many juggling pins. Scott, on the other hand, in perpetual crisis-mode, demands a final verdict. His defeat is as pre-programmed as her float to the top. 

Poppy's presumptuous "arrogance" manifests as an indiscriminate affability that assumes everyone can be gotten on the same jaunty wave-length. She establishes rapport of a certain kind by default, while Scott seems to resent the need to engage at all. Whence the paradox of his vehement devaluation and simultaneous desire for Poppy.  

Scott's possessiveness has more of hatred than tenderness. He could only love Poppy if she submitted to his control. But cutting Poppy down to size proves to be a bit like attempting catching a fish barehanded. To succeed would annul the very basis of genuine intimacy--its incalculable, open-ended mutuality. Unable to internalize without being displaced by her, there is no relational path forward for him. 

Walking through a blighted neighborhood, Poppy is lured off the street by the inchoate rambling of a schizophrenic. Not put-off by his unkempt appearance and wild expression, she strikes up an oddly playful conversation. He turns down her offer of money before reciprocating her inquisitive gaze with an incredulous one of his own, puzzled by her unlikely solicitude. He makes as if to stroke her hair, then pulls back and trudges off into the night. Engaging the stranger without fear, Poppy assumes the role of the innocent fool enlightened by compassion--Leigh's understanding of Christ.

Poppy is curious rather than repulsed by the manifestations of disgruntlement around her. With the exception of her pregnant sister, all disagreeable types (social evil to her allocentric mind) are male. When she's not gliding nonchalantly past their unspoken despair she becomes a fully three dimensional human being. Yet for all her good cheer and fellow-feeling, she doesn't attempt to rescue them. Men aren't surrogate children, but 'mates'--fellow travelers who more often than not fail to forge for themselves the fortune which smiles so benignly upon her.   

To help her with the bully at school Poppy engages a social worker who exudes health and civility. He gives her his phone number and they hook up for joyful genitality. (They are not sadomasochists.)

At her next driving lesson Poppy’s flippancy riles Scott. He sternly admonishes her, saying she will have an accident and die laughing if she can't pull herself together and be serious. He will not have her endangering people for her own amusement. 

Scott diagnoses and indicts the forces threatening Britannia: "the disease of multiculturalism…is non-culturalism." Desired because "they want to reduce collective will.” (Only failed souls question that diversity entails the unalloyed enrichment of society. To enjoy human rights means no person can be illegal, the only just community must be indiscriminately inclusive.) 

In a fit of rage Scott expounds his paranoid numerological theory about the Washington Monument. (Dig deep enough in any racist’s mind and you will find a conspiratorial faith.) For once Poppy seems at a loss, though the shadow of a bemused smirk never quite leaves her face. “Are you an only child, Scott?” she asks tendentiously. For a brief moment her pilot light seems extinguished.

Returning from a weekend outing with friends, Poppy spots Marc. He recognizes her and takes off in comical desperation. Later, in a misguided attempt to disown his maddening curiosity about Poppy, he denies having been there. 
  

During what will be their final lesson, Scott explodes. Poppy tells him he needs professional help, taking his car-keys to prevent him driving in his agitated state. Hilarity ensues when she refuses to give them back. He pulls her hair. She shrieks in disbelief. They chase one another around the car like over-sized children. 

Scott inadvertently betrays the depth of his sexual envy: “This is all about you—the world has to revolve around you....You got in that car with one thing in mind—to reel me in. ..Because you have to be adored...And you drink it in. And you leave me with a spring in your step and you go off and you fuck your boyfriend and you fuck your girlfriend…”

Calming down, he turns pensive. But for Poppy the situation is beyond mending. “I’m sorry if I upset you Scott. I wish I could make you happy.” Marc misunderstands her generosity as an attempt to conciliate, insisting “I'm a good driving instructor."

In the final scene Poppy and her room-mate row a boat over a large pond. “We’re lucky, aren’t we?” her friend muses. “Yeah, we are. Well, you make your own luck in life, don’t you?”  

 The film ends with an upward pan encompassing the park's bucolic grounds, Poppy's half-truth hanging in the air.