"I think you develop your relationships with the people in my movies the way you do in real life. When you meet, you react to them according to preconceptions based on everyone superficially like them that you have previously known. Then the image you have of the person gradually changes; as it becomes three-dimensional it moves away from that original image and grows closer to the person as he or she really is."
Leigh concedes that the forced jollity of an early scene between Poppy and a distant bookstore owner may put off some audiences. "You could be forgiven for wondering, 'Can I spend two hours with her?' Then you learn that she works hard and is a committed, grounded adult." To Leigh, Poppy demonstrates what happens when "anyone with a highly developed sense of humor, like Poppy, or me, comes up against people who are clinically divorced from a sense of humor. You can't help debunking the situation."
At its most daring, Happy-Go-Lucky puts Poppy in the driver's seat with that morose driving educator Scott (Eddie Marsan). "He's deeply insecure and paranoid and he misinterprets everything, and he can't believe that she's not only a teacher, but a good one. He assumes she's a barmaid, because he thinks she's so chaotic." Scott comes to represent the meanness and weakness of a blinkered view of the world, just as Poppy comes to represent the buoyancy and, yes, toughness, that emerges from a hopeful and unencumbered embrace of the world.
In the film's most mysterious passage, Poppy wanders into a blighted cityscape, where she establishes a persuasive rapport with a grubby, babbling homeless man (Stanley Townsend). Leigh wanted to create a sequence that would pull the audience out of its comfort zone.
"She has an inquiring mind," Leigh explains, "and she hears someone chanting. She's already in a reflective state; she has few barriers to life anyway, and hers are totally down here." When the man asks, "Know what I mean?" Poppy says, "Yeah, I do" - and you believe her. It's a pure, poetic expression of E.M. Forster's dictum, "Only connect." When Poppy returns home, she doesn't say a thing about it to her roommate. "As open as she is, she has a private life, you see. That's what she's all about. She is a complete human being."
