Happy-go-lucky

Mike Leigh's Happy-go-lucky has been generally read as a pendant to his earlier masterpiece Naked -- the heroine of Happy-go-Lucky, Poppy, is as relentlessly optimistic and cheerful as the rapist anti-hero of Naked was pessimistic and violent; both films show a sisterhood of women precariously surviving under male assault and each features masculine paranoia in full efflorescence. From this context, most critics express only mild approval for Happy-go-lucky content with the argument that the nihilistic evil of Naked's anti-hero (horrifyingly portrayed by David Thewlis) is like Milton's Satan far more interesting, and engaging, than Poppy's sometimes irritating and saintly goodness. I think this criticism misses one of Leigh's salient points: Happy-go-Lucky is about education. The profound and philosophically engaging question that the film proposes is this: What is the education required in a world that is rife with madness, viiolence, and evil? Poppy is an elementary school teacher. Her methods of teaching are contrasted with the instruction that she receives from a maniacal driving teacher. The driving instructor believes that education should be training in constant vigilance, a steady focus on the evils in the world that can ambush us. His perspective is persuasive, but it is apparent that he is also mad. The other paradigm for education that the film presents is a teacher of Spanish flamenco dance -- she personifies the notion that education must make us savage, fierce, and intensely dignified. Savagery and fierceness, combined with a grace under pressure and a relentless concern for dignity are the tools that his teacher thinks people require to survive. Two close-ups show Poppy pensively gazing into the world -- Leigh uses very few close-ups and lets his fantastically talented ensemble simply perform in master-shot for most of the movie. In one shot, Poppy is watching as one child beats another -- an image for the ceaseless violence in the world. In the other important close-up, she looks out across a sky beautiful with drifting clouds. The world is simultaneously dangerous and beautiful. I think Happy-go-lucky gets less praise than it deserve because it is hard to write about this movie, which I think is indelible and indispensable, without sounding "sappy" or sentimental. Goodness and virtue are hard to portray and even harder to write about from a critical perspective. For this reason the nihilistic darkness of Naked may seem more profound and meaningful than the grace and kindness that are the subject of Happy-go-lucky. But Leigh's point is a very important one. Poppy is not one of Dostoevsky's holy fools -- she isn't stupid or naive. In one scene, we learn that she spent a year traveling in Southeast Asia -- places like Bali, Thailand, and Vietnam. She has seen the world, or, a large part of it, and her kindness and goodness are not unearned -- they seem to be the result of some sort of inner discipline, something apparent in the opening scene in which Poppy's bike is stolen. A lesser director than Leigh would show Poppy's happiness to be a facade; there would be a scene in which her goodness fails and she is broken. But Leigh doesn't take this route. The relentless violence shown by David Thewlis' character in Naked was a facade -- in the most horrifying scene of the movie, we see him flailing around in some kind of seizure, regressive to an infantile state as an abused, bullied child. Poppy, through her kindness, perhaps, saves a child from the fate of the protagonist in Naked -- she understands the fundamental rule that to those to whom evil is done do evil themselves. But, again, these sentiments will seem unfashionably gentle, kind, even Christian. Better, perhaps, to savor some of the films precisely observed details -- the way five girls who have partied all night in high-heeled boots limp through the London streets to their flat, staggering single file in a high shot, along grey streets, the eerie arcade under a freeway where a homeless man babbles and mutters, Poppy's odd way of holding her arms back like wings when she is embraced by her lover, the final image of the two women, each pushing an oar through the water of a green lake, rowing in a lagoon in a London park -- a homely, domestic, but powerful image of human cooperation.