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Happy-Go-Lucky
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In
the cinema of Mike Leigh, the opposite of happiness is not sadness: it’s anger.
Hence the emphasis on stress, rage, bad vibes, personal blockages of various
sorts that lead to low-level grumpiness (most of his films) or high-level
violence (Naked, 1993).
Happy-Go-Lucky gets interesting
– far more engaging than most of Leigh’s efforts past or present – once it
starts tracing (or noodling around) a particular nexus of physical states of
everyday being: dancing, drinking, driving, madness, affection (between girls:
it’s Leigh’s Sex in the City),
bullying …
The
film neither much starts anywhere nor ends anywhere – the “life is a boat, so
keep rowing” final scene is particularly weak. But, in-between, it explores
this zone of physical/emotional life from a particular
and unusual (because little seen in movies) angle of attack: it’s about
teaching and social work, the nurturing/caring professions (and their
perversions, as with the driving teacher Scott played by Eddie Marsan), and
their way of plaintively trying to puncture through to a truth. “You’re an only
child, then?” “Do you see your folks much?” “Got a girlfriend?”
In
the bad-vibe complex drawn here, there’s an intriguing link between Leigh and Maurice
Pialat. In John Cassavetes,
on the other hand, there’s more real joy, amidst all the hysteria and pain …
As
a film, Happy-Go Lucky has a pretty
awful score by Gary Yershon (a typical deficiency in Leigh’s work); and mainly
bland staging and cinematography – although the car scenes (shades of Abbas Kiarostami’s Ten [2002]!) do have some zip in them.
We
see, familiar in Leigh, the old narrative-moral trajectory of judging the central
woman (Sally Hawkins as Poppy) and bringing her around to the supposed maturity
of hetero bonding and imminent motherhood. Does the crazed driver speak the
truth of the heroine’s immaturity? The process of truth-telling is always
loaded in Leigh; he displays a rather resentful world-view.
The
bizarre promo/review image of the film portrays Poppy as relentlessly
optimistic, cheerful, striving to bring happiness to all … But this is not, in
fact, the case. Rather, she is relentlessly jokey,
which is quite a different matter. Sometimes her happy behaviour is a shield,
an evasion; sometimes it is just mindless patter; sometimes it even creates
intimacy (between girls, at any rate). And when she’s with the mad Scott, she’s
mainly just listening, as a passing “cover”.
MORE Leigh: All or Nothing, Career Girls, Secrets & Lies, Life is Sweet, Peterloo © Adrian Martin 3 March 2009 |
