mike leigh has made a new movie..
(and if you haven’t found him yet..mike leigh makes great flics..)
“..At the heart of Mike Leigh’s buoyant but decidedly not simplistic “Happy-Go-Lucky” is a single performance:
Sally Hawkins — who has had roles in several of Leigh’s pictures, as well as in numerous British films and TV series — plays Poppy, a North London elementary-school teacher who is, to put it simply, relentlessly happy.
We meet Poppy during the movie’s opening credits sequence, where we see a girl with a wide smile, wearing a brightly colored crochet sweater, pedaling through London on her bike.
She’s laughing and smiling, seemingly for no reason; she waves to people she probably doesn’t even know.
She wanders into a bookstore and begins chattering, cheerfully, to the sullen clerk, who simply ignores her.
She emerges from the store to find her bike has been stolen, which she treats as a big laugh.
The first time I saw that opening sequence, I wasn’t sure I could stand watching this woman for the next 90 minutes or so.
But that, I think, is part of Leigh’s marvelous, meandering plan: Just a few scenes later, I wanted to know more about her, as it became gradually clear that Poppy’s resolute happiness does not signal a lack of depth.
Poppy isn’t happy because she retreats from the world — she’s happy because she’s so fully in it.
Which doesn’t mean that her life is one big laugh: She springs to action when she sees one of her students behaving aggressively, knowing that his brutish behavior is a symptom of his own unhappiness.
She signs up for driving lessons and gets stuck with a weirdo driving instructor named Scott (played by marvelous English actor Eddie Marsan), a freakishly uptight guy with some strange and rigid ideas about race relations and a fearsome, volatile temper.
But instead of recoiling from Scott, Poppy tries to cajole him out of his perpetual bad mood, as if she senses intuitively that his inflexibility is causing him a great deal of suffering.
When Poppy goes to see a chiropractor, and he cracks her back, she giggles and says, “That hurts so much it makes me laugh,” which could be a motto for the way she navigates the world around her.
Hawkins won the best actress prize at the Berlin Film Festival earlier this year, and that jury knew what it was doing:
..This is the performance to see this year..
..one that lots of people will be talking about through the fall and winter..”
go to source/story>>Toronto Film Festival: Mike Leigh | Salon Arts & Entertainment