Mike Leigh's new film in Berlin

Mike Leigh's new film screened in Berlin last night - it's a great London film, a bit lighter than some of his other films, but no less truthful and well acted and written...

Here's a review I've written for Time Out's website:

Happy-Go-Lucky (2008)
Director: Mike Leigh

Five stars

There’s usually one character that lords over and defines any film by Mike Leigh, whether it’s David Thewlis’ Johnny in ‘Naked’, Timothy Spall’s Maurice in ‘Secrets and Lies’, or Imelda Staunton’s kind-hearted abortionist in ‘Vera Drake’. With his new film, Leigh once again offers us an immensely memorable and esquitely well-crafted persona in the form of Sally Hawkins’ Poppy, a woman we follow intimately from the first to the last shot of a film that has many pleasures – not least Hawkins’ lovely performance as a glass-half-full, 30-year-old Londoner who holds a mirror up to all of us.

But the tone of ‘Happy-Go-Lucky’ is a great deal lighter than any of those films mentioned above. In its use of comedy, sometimes laugh-out-loud, to reveal truths that are both happy and sad, it’s slightly reminiscent of Leigh’s earlier television films such as ‘Nuts in May’ and ‘Abigail’s Party’. Yet that comparison only goes so far. What ‘Happy-Go’Lucky’ most feels like is a positive inversion of ‘Naked’, the bleak 1993 film that followed a hate-filled man (Thewlis) around our city’s streets. Both are contemporary London tales; both are slyly telling or reflective of the times; both look for moments of poetry within realism (here an atonal late-night meeting with a disturbed tramp); and both are as much composite portraits of an individual as they are straight stories. While Johnny of ‘Naked’ was a misanthrope of the highest order, the defining character of Hawkins’ Poppy is her love of life. Leigh’s films are often and lazily described as ‘gritty’ or ‘miserable’. This is joyful and life-affirming and proud of it.

We first catch sight of Poppy on a bright spring day as she cycles her way through Holborn, across the river and to a bookshop on Lower Marsh Road where she browses and jokes relentlessly with an sad-faced shop assistant. Poppy is smiling, all at ease, dressed brightly and full of life. Next, we see her down at Koko in Camden, pogo-ing to Pulp before she and her mates stagger back to her flat in Finsbury Park and mess around drunkenly in the living room as the sun comes up. It ought to be a little surprising when, 20 minutes in, we discover why Poppy and her flatmate, Zoe (Alexis Zegerman) have been battling their hangovers by making chicken-head costumes out of brown paper bags and cereal packets. She’s a primary-school teacher, and a dedicated and caring one at that. She keeps an eye out for the bullies and the bullied. She shares her kids’ wonder as they discuss the migration of birds (‘It’d be amazing to fly, wouldn’t it?'). She even spends time in the pub after school worrying about Playstations, a lack of open space and parental stress.

‘Happy-Go-Lucky’ is sly entertainment. It’s only when you’re resigned to a funny, touching, well-observed character study that themes start to coalesce and within the typically deep performances, moments of humour and patches of melancholy there emerges something deeper and increasingly affecting. The film is a study in sadness versus happiness, a study in teachers and the taught, a study in how we carry with us everyday the burdens of what we have and haven’t learned along the way and how, as Poppy says best, life ‘can be hard at times, but that’s part of it’. The moment you know you’re watching something both wonderfully light-footed and cleverly truthful is when Leigh moves nimbly between scenes at a primary school, an after-work flamenco class that Poppy attends with a colleague (a comic highlight) and one of Poppy’s driving lessons.

It’s those driving lessons with Scott (Eddie Marsan) that, along with a trip to visit an uptight sister in Southend and a blossoming romance with a social worker (Samuel Roukin), offer most in the way of story and reflect Poppy’s character by contrasting her with a man who is repressed, bitter, angry and unable to cope with her (‘You celebrate chaos!’ Scott whines). Scott is in marked opposition to this critic who never, despite early worries, found Poppy’s bubbly nature and colourful dress (à la Beverly of ‘Abigail’s Party’) too much. Marsan is excellent. There’s even a hint of Thewlis’ Johnny when he lunges, mid-driving lesson, into a speech about how the measurements of a memorial in Washington DC add up to the devilish number of 666. Light and smart and illuminating, ‘Happy-Go-Lucky’ is a greater film than it even pretends to be. By viewing one life, it allows us to view them all.

Author: Dave Calhoun
Time Out London