Heroes Not Zombies

I’m a big fan of Mike Leigh, but although there is a lot of humour in many of his movies, they’re generally pretty dark. His latest movie, Happy-go-lucky, is quite different, yet it retains those essential characteristics of Mike Leigh films – I can’t quite explain it but he manages to make you both care about and squirm about his characters. But what they do more than anything else is highlight what it means to be human, with all the frailty and awkwardness that comes as part of the package.

Happy-go-lucky tells the story of Poppy, a Primary School teacher in London. She’s a single 30 year old with a totally irrepressible positive spirit. She’s smiles a lot, laughs a lot, jokes a lot. Even when she encounters difficulties she deals with them positively. At one point in the movie, she’s told “You can’t make everybody happy” and she replies that it’s worth trying.

My favourite scenes are the flamenco classes. Flamenco always moves me. I love its passion and its fire. The Spanish flamenco dance teacher whose class Poppy attends is brilliant – probably one of the best characters in the whole movie. You can see a couple of scenes in this Channel 4 interview with Mike Leigh –

I have a very positive spirit. In fact, I don’t really see the point in taking a negative attitude to life. I’m pretty sure the stance we take determines the experiences we get.