Here in the Berlin competition it is a face-off between the two heraldic masks of drama. Wearing the one with the down-turned mouth, in the corner washed with blood, sweat, tears and derrick oil, is Paul Thomas Anderson’s There Will Be Blood. Wearing the mask with the laugh-lines is Mike Leigh’s life-affirming Happy-Go-Lucky, in which a fun-loving chav (Sally Hawkins) insists there’s more to life than just getting through it. Even if you live in north London, suggests the film, you can crack jokes, gladden an uptight driving instructor (Eddie Marsan) – or try – and teach schoolchildren to make birds’ heads out of brown paper shopping bags.

Everyone has loved Happy-Go-Lucky. After Vera Drake it seems a mind-bogglingly good-natured movie. (Has Leigh been to a back-street lobotomist?) Lead actress Hawkins comes on like a tipsy hurricane, clothed in what seem multicoloured rag-bag remnants picked up by a tornado and wrapped around her. With her tippy-toeing, high-heel swagger one is amazed she can cross a road. (Sometimes she can’t.) She is the consummation of the toujours gai Leigh heroines that began, for most of us, with the title hostess of Abigail’s Party.