..Gary Dretzka
..Noah Forrest
..Leonard Klady
..R.J. Matson
..David Poland
..Douglas Pratt
..Ray Pride
..Kim Voynar
..Michael Wilmington

Happy-Go-Lucky
Directed by Mike Leigh

Happy-Go-Lucky is a miracle. From all outward appearances it's a film that ought not to work, and certainly not with the ease and warmth that exudes from the screen. It's a calculated, rambling yarn of a feckless young woman whose optimism appears boundless and based less on situation than pure attitude.

Goodness here is not the best revenge but one presumes it's either innate or engrained in one's experience and environment. Yet it's neither blind nor a crutch. It's perhaps an option and most certainly the manner that its heroine chooses to view the world.

Poppy (Sally Hawkins) is thirtyish, shares a London flat with longtime friend Zoe (Alexis Zegerman) and teaches in an elementary school. She's pretty in an unconventional way but has a ferocious joie de vivre that's likely to attract as much as repel the opposite sex. She doesn't have to think about whom she is … she simply soaks up what comes her way and processes it with disarming honesty.

Happy-Go-Lucky can be viewed as a visual diary of a couple of weeks in a life. They're not particularly propitious days. Following the theft of her bicycle she decides to take driving lessons; on a fellow teacher's invitation Poppy enters a Flamenco class; and in dealing with a troubled student, she winds up dating a social worker. None of this is likely to lead to the Grand Prix, a new career or unending bliss.

The film doesn't need (and thankfully avoids) big moments to be compelling. It has personality and character and while Poppy and those she encounters aren't like you or me, there's something sufficiently familiar to connect to the scattered incidents that in a rare reflective moment she refers to as a pathway to adulthood.

The film conveys the brighter side of writer-director Mike Leigh that he's explored before in High Hopes and Life is Sweet among other pictures. It doesn't have the obvious dramatic underpinnings of Secrets & Lies or Vera Drake but the narrative is no less absorbing. He really has no equal in dealing with the ordinary in a fashion where the wider truths have an organic power that eschews emphasis or embellishment. There's also no one who quite captures the sheer pleasure of living.

As ever, the film is exquisitely crafted without the slightest hint of panache. There's a particularly inspired musical score by Gary Yershon that beckons fond memories of the French New Wave - an era Happy-Go-Lucky recalls without mimicking its eccentricities.

Hawkins' Polly is pitch perfect; capturing the character's penchant to rattle on as if all problems could be resolved if she took both sides of the argument. Yet, there's never a sense that she's not listening and taking the measure of the person whether it's the angry and unbalanced driving instructor Scott (Eddie Marsan) or her passionately consumed Flamenco teacher (Karina Fernandez) - both remarkable and unpredictable performances.

Leigh is the sort of filmmaker that has limitless capacity to extend his artists creative freedom; particularly if they do his bidding. That's his genius and comfort zone and the sort of subtle irony that makes his best films little miracles that cannot and should not be dissected too clinically.

- Leonard Klady