Happy-Go-Lucky

On the surface, this is a pretty mindless film about a pretty strange and not necessarily likable character. Basically, it takes Poppy and Zoe two hours to go boating, making them infinitely faster than Céline and Julie.

Poppy is Mike Leigh's answer to Amélie, cute and upbeat. Yet, Mike Leigh being Mike Leigh, she is simultaneously really funny and unabashedly annoying. The characters that she meets are only sometimes likeable. Many of them are pretty unredeemable. Poppy is way too upbeat about the little bully in her class being "okay". In fact, she is too upbeat about everything including her apartment that contains possibly the most ugly lamp that I have ever seen.

Yet, the film raises interesting questions. The most important and lingering one of these is, did they buy those stockings in every color or did they leave one out?