Zhang Yimou came to international attention with a series of relatively epic movies set in the first eight decades of the twentieth century (including Raise the Red Lantern, Ju Dou, To Live) with actress Gong Li. Most of those movies had troubles with the PRC censors. After indulging her as a chanteuse in the opulently photographed Shanghai Triad (1995), Zhang and Gong ended their personal and professional relationship. She moved on to another success in "The Emperor and the Assassin," directed by the other great PRC film master, Chen Kaige.

Now that Zhang is again receiving international acclaim with epic romantic martial arts movies (Hero, House of the Flying Daggers), it looks as if the interim between the epics of suffering with Gong Li and wuxia (warrior) epics was a period of making small-scale, relatively sentimental movies about common people with problems that are overwhelming to them, but not of history-making import like the rise and fall of dynasties, civil wars, or the rampages of Maoist social engineering that Zhang (born in 1951) experienced growing up and trying to receive an education during the Great Proletarian Culture Revolution (during which he was exiled deeper into the countryside, like the young men in "Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress.")

The very finite supply of chalk and the monomania of a thirteen-year-old girl coerced into filling-in for an absent teacher in a rural elementary school are displayed in Not One Less (1999) with what strikes me as an "Aw shucks, aren't people nice" ending out of the Frank Capra quiver. "Happy Time" (Xingfu shiguang, 2001) is billed as a comedy, not a genre would expect a Zhang Yimou movie to be in. It and "Not One Less" are considerably more sentimental than the Gong Li period or the more recent martial art romances.

The first half hour or so of "Happy Time" is fairly comic (the closest PRC analogue I've seen is the sweet oddities in "Shower"(Xixhoa)). Zhao (Zhao Benshan) is a "retired" factory worker. That is the state-run factory at which he worked retired, throwing all its employees out of work. I'd guess that Zhao is in his early-to-mid-50s. He wants a wife to make things cozy for him, but with a small pension and no savings, he has not been having much success.

At the start of the movie, Zhao is in a restaurant trying to negotiate a marriage to an obese and skeptical woman Dong Lifhan (Dong Lihua, who strongly resembles a Chinese Divine). She has been married twice before and tells him that she has two children. She also tells him that she wants a big wedding that will require 50,000 yuan. Desperate for his 18th engagement to supply him with a wife, Zhao assures her that he can easily raise the money.

Zhao's friend, reluctant advisor, and even more reluctant creditor "Little" Fu (who is almost as corpulent as the fiancée hits on a scheme to generate some income. In a park behind the closed factory is an abandoned bus. Fu proposes that they clean it up as a place for young lovers wanting privacy to go. After the inside of the bus and the inside of the windows are painted on the pinkish side of bordello red, young couples are indeed interested in renting what the sign on the bus calls "Happy Time Hut." Zhao is quite shocked that they want to lock the door after making a contribution. His prudishness is unexpected, though I guess his wife-hunting has little to do with randiness.

Visiting fiancée #18, Zhao misspeaks or is misheard to claim to manage the Happy Time Hotel. "Chunky Mama" has an even more obese son who is very nasty to his step-sister. Though both children's fathers are gone, the son is as big as Cinderella's three step-sisters. OK, I don't know how big Cinderella's step-sisters were or have much confidence in my memory that there were three of them, but Ying (Dong Jie) is treated very much like Cinderella. Plus she is blind. And very skinny (in reality, ballet-student slender, looking anorexic in the household with "Chunky Mama" and the spoiled, very obese boy-god.

Since Zhao is manager of a hotel, "Chunky Mama" insists that he give the unwanted girl a job in it. This leads to ludicrous efforts to fool the girl into believing that the empty factory is a hotel. Zhao and some other former workers in the factory set up a massage table, and Ying starts earning tips as a masseuse. The efforts to try to fool her into believing she is a hotel employee are considerable, and none of the well-intentioned elders seems to consider that blind people relying on their other senses tend to have acute hearing and touch.

Ying likes her "customers" and her "customers" like her, but without money, the charade cannot be maintained. Instead of having something to laugh at, the predicament of the characters is heartbreaking--in the best early Zhao manner of a woman being crushed. The well-intentioned folks (reminding me of the massive efforts to maintain a pretended status in the two versions Frank Capra made of "Lady for a Day, " more maudlin that those in Preston Sturges's "Hail the Conquering Hero") occupy the middle of the movie; the ending of "Happy Times" is a tear-jerker. (It is tougher than the Capraesque or Disneyesque endings of "Not One Less" and "The Road Home.")

There is no bravura camerawork and a relatively grainy vérité style as the handheld camera wanders around an unspecified Chinese city. Zhao Benshan is touching in trying to make Ying happy and Dong Jie is very good as the whipping girl for her step-mother and the favored son, who then shyly blossoms with a job, and behaves with great delicacy. As Zhao's early movies depended upon Gong Li, and "Not One Less" depended on the earnest thirteen-year-old substitute teacher, "Happy Times" rests on the thin shoulders of a preadolescent slip of a girl. She manages to carry the movie, which I think ceases to be a comedy, or turns into a very sad comedy. The laughs are mostly (but not entirely) in the first half hour, but almost from the first appearance of the mistreatment of Ying, there is little to laugh at. I'd characterize the movie as more melodrama than comedy, and the shift from broad comedy is awkward.

What does the movie say about Chinese society? That life is now soft for some (with the step-brother on track to be sumo wrestler size), and very hard for many, including those who worked for state-run industries that have downsized and for anyone disabled (massage is an occupational slot for the blind without connotations of prostitution in China). There is considerable unemployment and probably more considerable make-work (which, in a way the blind girl's massage service paid for with fake money is an instance of). And some see Zhao's efforts at saving "face" as a disguised comment on the PRC state (and his not being able to maintain the charade indefinitely a warning of the many unrealistic government policies and claims, as the transformation of "hut" to "hotel" is also emblematic of official hyperbole). Ying breaking out from dependence has also been read as a positive model of free enterprise in the post-Maoist but still officially communist and still very Leninist PRC. As usual, there are multiple possible readings of the political subtexts in this and in other Zhang Yimou movies. This one seems simple melodrama tinged with comedy, but Zhang's works are scrutinized both by PRC censors and by at least part of his foreign audience (by no means just me! though I have written at some length about the politics of his recent pair of martial arts romances, "Hero" and House of the Flying Daggers.




Recommended:
Yes