No Ordinary Fool

Mike Leigh’s comic film tells the tale of a month in the life of Poppy (Sally Hawkins), a 30-year old London woman. By day, she is a primary school teacher. By night, she takes trampolining and flamenco classes. At the weekend, she has driving lessons and hangs out with her girl friends. So far, so very mundane. However, what makes Poppy so special is her tremendous gaiety and, as is gradually revealed, her genuine compassion for others.

Simply put, Poppy’s ambition is to make people happy. In that sense, you might be immediately reminded of the modern French fairy tale that is Amelie. However, while there are strong comparative characteristics to both films, Poppy is a far more complicated character than son amie de l’autre côté de la Manche, with her lust for life and not a scrap of shyness or reserve in her. Moreover, she is unmissable with her broad grin, chirpy kookiness, and an insistence on wearing high-heeled patterned boots, garish colours, and enough bangles to start a band with.

Poppy is irrepressible – be it trying to elicit a friendly word from a shop-owner determined to ignore her or her cheeky admiration of the bosom of another lady at the dance class. Even when bad things happen to her, she seems to take them breezily in her stride and refuses to be downcast about anything. Her whole personality is to be open, candid, and unapologetic for who she is and how she would like the world to be.

Indeed, even beyond Poppy, this film is about different people’s abilities to deal with their emotions and who they are in life. For example, other characters include the smiling yet cynical flatmate Zoe (Alexis Zegerman), Poppy’s pregnant younger sister who is tortured with self-doubt, and the splendidly cast flamenco teacher (Karina Fernandez), who is a human dynamo of self-expression.

However, it is the three deeply troubled characters that Poppy encounters during the course of the film that are the most intriguing. The first is an angry young pupil who punches his classmates, then there is Scott (Eddie Marsan), her introverted and ill-tempered driving instructor, and, finally, there is the demented middle-aged homeless man (Stanley Townsend). These three men (which, in itself, is interesting) form an important triumvirate of characters whose bottled-up emotions inevitably erupt into occasional acts of violent expression. Poppy, with the help of a social worker, appears able to reach out to the young boy, whilst the homeless man now seems irretrievably lost to his sad and angry ramblings. However, it is Poppy’s encounters with the one in the middle, Scott, that presents the funniest and darkest moments in the film.

Scott is a reticent, troubled man, at odds with society – in effect, the antithesis of Poppy. He manages to hide himself behind the veneer of his job until Poppy’s incessant babble of good-natured banter wears him down to the point where anger, vexation, and bigoted diatribes increasingly pour out of him. In the beginning, the scenes between them are very funny, with his truculent attempts to remain professional no match for her quick-witted spontaneity. However, there is a tension building and the explosion, when it comes, perhaps brings about a watershed in both characters’ lives.

The only part of the film that disappointed me was the slightly stilted romantic encounter that Poppy has. In particular, the love interest (Samuel Roukin) was disappointingly wooden in his performance and the (modest) love scene between them came across as being quite unnatural.

In all, though, this is a great movie to go see. Be it the lovable oddball nature of Poppy’s character or what seems to be the darker message of the film with respect to the responsibility that teachers have in identifying the emotional difficulties of children in a world where parents increasingly disown their responsibilities and where the emotionally immature ultimately get left behind.