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HAPPY TIMES Send This Review to a Friend
Esteemed Chinese director Zhang Yimou has come up with a bittersweet, sometimes dark urban comedy that gives us a picture of contemporary city life in China while telling us a tender story beneath an outer layer of cynical behavior. "Happy Times" is quite funny in some moments and reaches for the heart in others.
The set-up is an odd one. Zhao, a poor and none-too-good-looking bachelor, played by Zhao Bensham, has been unsuccessful with the ladies. Now he is wooing a plump woman (Dong Lihua) who is grasping and demanding, and he is trying to impress her to the point of pretending that he has money and owns a hotel. She lives with her fat pig of a spoiled, mean-spirited young son and her stepdaughter Wu Ying (Dong Jie), who is blind and treated cruelly.
Zhang and his cronies concoct a plan for him to raise some money by fixing up an old bus to rent by the hour for couples to have sex. When Wu Ying's stepmother asks Zhao to give the girl a job in his hotel, Zhao plans to install her as a masseuse in the bus, called the "Happy Times Hotel." Alas, his luck runs out and the bus is towed away. Ever resourceful, Zhao and his friends place Wu Ying in an abandoned warehouse where they fix up a makeshift room. Since she is blind, she doesn't know where she is. Zhang's friends come to get massages from her but eventually, feeling guilty about what they are doing, they begin to worry about her well being.
There are funny, gallows humor complications. Of course, the blind young lady, who has dreams of her own for fulfilling her life, is soon perceptive enough to realize she's being deceived. But she feels good about the attention the men are giving her to make her feel employed and wanted, more kindness than she has ever received before. The further twist is the experience's positive effect on Zhao.
Director Imou manages to show us much about urban Chinese living along the way, and in this film, quite different from others he has made ("Red Sorghum," "Raise the Red Lantern," "The Story of Qiu Ju"), he smoothly blends broad, sometimes nasty comedy with tenderness and a rosy, hopeful ending. A Sony Pictures Classics release.
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