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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Mel O&#039;Drama" data-source="post: 251414" data-attributes="member: 23"> Happy Since I Met You (9th August 1981) <img src="https://ladydontfallbackwards.files.wordpress.com/2010/10/cover049.jpg" alt="" class="fr-fic fr-dii fr-draggable " style="" />This one took me by surprise. I loved it and yet I wouldn’t be in a hurry to watch it again. Which is one of many contradictions of this film. It feels open and spacious while being oppressive. It’s charming and brutal. Plodding but sure-footedly direct. Above all, it’s tangibly human. Though I must have watched it before at least once, I remembered nothing about this film going in. And nothing came back or felt even a little familiar as it went along. Which was great, because I went into it knowing next to nothing about who’s in it or what it’s about. The first minor surprise: no Victoria Wood. On-screen at least. Her voice can be heard metaphorically through the attention to detail with the dialogue, and literally through the songs played on the soundtrack throughout. I loved Baz Taylor’s choice for that first shot: Julie Walters framed through the distorted porthole of an open washing machine door as she sits in a launderette (or is it a laundrette? I never know the difference) reading the newspaper. Once the door is closed, prosaic reality snaps into sharp focus, but the hint that things aren’t necessarily all they appear resonated. Everything about that first scene felt real and right: Julie with her permed hair and chunky waffle-knit jumper over jeans reminded me of my Mum’s style of the time. She sits in the window of the laundrette and the backdrop is a very established-looking residential street. As she walks home, coat on and quirky uptempo music playing over the opening credits, I can almost smell the Manchester air and taste the pollutants from the four star petrol of the cars. It’s winter. Trees are bare and she seems to live in a cosy Victorian suburb. I’m not terribly familiar with Manchester, but I’m reminded of Didsbury, a pleasant little suburb in which I once Airbnb’d on one of my visits to the city. She arrives home, is accosted by nosy neighbour, Corrie’s Sheila Birtles, goes to unlock the front door and then there’s the first of many brutal cuts as we find ourselves in her classroom. The no-frills editing adds to the documentary-like realism of the tone. It reminds me very much of Verna Fields’s editing in Jaws, which served much the same purpose. There’s some lovely banter with her drama class who buy her some mascara:Even a few minutes in, it’s established that this is a very different kind of story to the one told in Talent and its follow-up. Frances is also quite a different character to Julie Stephens. And yet not, because Julie Walters is always recognisably Julie Walters. Comfortingly so. Frances is the kind of teacher whose classes I’d have looked forward to attending. There are no airs and graces. Just connection with the kids. By virtue of the fact that she’s a teacher, this is a more middle-class world. But Frances isn’t someone who seems to be bothered about that. Not like her loudly upwardly mobile colleague, Mags from EastEnders, who shows off her ring:Already, there are statements about relationships and the motives behind them. And Frances looks on it with something resembling pity. (continued)</blockquote>

Verification: What month follows July?