|
| Happy Times (Xingfu Shiguang) |
|
  (9/10)
|
Runtime: 95 |
| Public Rating: 9.00 (3 votes) |
Director: Zhang Yimou |
| MPAA Rating: pg.gif |
| Genre: comedy/drama |
Year: 2000 |
| Writer(s): Zhang Yimou |
| Distributor: 1 |
| Reviewed by: Avril Carruthers |
| |
Starring Zhao Benshan, Dong Jie, Leng Qibin, Fu Biao,
In Mandarin with English subtitles.
Happy Times is a departure from the more usual serious fare of China’s foremost director Zhang Yimou (Raise the Red Lantern, Not One Less and The Road Home). It is an excellent comedy bordering on farce for the first half, the apparent caricatures deepening gradually into real characters who are believable and for the most part likable. Though the film is set in a modern Chinese city where poverty and wealth are as unequal as they are anywhere, there is little attempt to make this a social commentary.
Yimou’s trademark is his deft touch in exploring various facets of the Chinese character in a particular environment – sometimes universally human, sometimes more specifically conditioned to Chinese culture and tradition with all the clashes of the modern and the ancient ways, the urban and the rural, youth and age.
The characters here are mostly simple, good-hearted, hard-working people with dreams they may not be able to realise. The film lightly illustrates different sorts of blindness – along with the physical blindness of one character, there are also the sorts that are wilful, unintentional, and constitutional.
Foolish, happy-go-lucky Zhao (Zhao Benshan) is an aging, laid-off factory worker who is in search of a bride. We hear that it is his eighteenth attempt and for this one – a particularly voluptuous ‘chunky mama’ - he has invented himself as wealthy, for which he scurries to borrow the money as usual from long-suffering friend Fu (Fu Biao). Fu has no money but an enterprising mind. He has an idea, using paint found at the dump, to turn an old decrepit bus in a wasteland lovers’ lane into a lucrative private assignation spot, calling it the ‘Happy Times Hut’.
One of the humorous devices in this movie is that Zhao is so simple that he cannot see how to take advantage of situations, and while his imagination is wild when it comes to telling tall tales to people in order to try to impress them, he is unable to use any imagination in concretely planning a project or foreseeing possible outcomes until they are upon him, when he will usually resort to fantastic lies once again to worm his way out of trouble. He is also the kind of fantasist who, living largely in his own illusions, is unable to assess other people accurately. From the outset we can see that ‘Chunky Mama’ (Leng Qibin) is a gold-digging, cold-hearted opportunist, but he cannot.
Much of the way this movie unobtrusively changes direction from comedy to tragedy is in this element of character development, with Zhao becoming disillusioned yet at the same time discovering deeper human values. Adding to this is his interaction with Wu Ying (Dong Jie), the blind, Cinderella-like step-daughter of Chunky Mama, whose father has left her there and apparently abandoned her.
Zhao is persuaded to employ Wu Ying, pale and delicate as the ‘yellow flower’ her name represents, as a masseuse at his mythical ‘Happy Times Hotel’ – which in the meantime has been taken away by crane in a municipal cleanup.
Enlisting the help of six of his friends, all laid-off workers, Zhao takes on a paternal role and sets about constructing a fake hotel in their abandoned factory where Wu can be employed as a masseuse. Tremendous industry ensues, with every effort being made to mimic a massage room in a real hotel, even to the point where they tape street noises from the door of a brothel so Wu will think the ‘hotel’ is in a busy part of the city.
Initially justifiably suspicious, since she has been systematically exploited as a live-in slave by Chunky Mama and her spoiled, obnoxious son, Wu gradually comes to trust Zhao, his generosity a new and welcome experience. She duly massages the six friends in their guise of rotating hotel guests, on a purpose-built massage table with a ridiculously large breathing hole, accepting with quiet, undeceived joy the paper notes they offer her in lieu of the real money they do not have. By the end we realise that despite her physical blindness her perception is the truest of all the characters. She can see through the deceptions Zhao and his friends have tried to perpetrate, to their deeper, heart-felt, benevolent motives. The fragility of her situation however, cannot be sustained by comedy and is the turning wheel of this movie into more serious treatment.
Zhao’s in-built need to believe in the fantastically impossible to survive a less than salubrious environment reminds me of similar characters, though Japanese, in Akira Kurosawa’s surreal Dodes’ka-den (1970). In post-atomic Japan an impoverished man living in an abandoned car with his little boy obsessively describes his dream house, making it ever more elaborate in proportion as the squalor and wretchedness of their actual situation grows. While the situation of this character and the others in that masterpiece are more tragic than Zhao’s, who also has more resources, the poignancy and optimism of the character’s response to his situation is the same. Yimou adds to this in that Zhao and his friends (with the possible exception of Fu) are chronically unable to conceive of any other way of being or to raise their station, so limited are they by their conditioning and their circumstances.
We are given superb performances from comedic actor Zhao Benshan as Zhao and Dong Jie as Wu, whose apparent fragility belies her adaptability and strength. She plays this blind girl most convincingly and when we see her concentrating, listening, sensing, feeling, our own experience of the film deepens. Brilliant also are the characterisations of Zhao’s friends, particularly Fu, as well as Chunky Mama and her revolting son.
It is interesting from a Western viewpoint that the end of this movie and the courage in Wu Ying’s personality have been described by some other reviewers as ‘melodramatic’. Once upon a time, even in the so-called Golden Years of Hollywood, genuine nobility and dignity of this kind were understood and portrayed heroically. Wu’s motives are in fact not the least melodramatic but arise from the Chinese traditional filial imperative to fulfil one’s obligations and not to be a burden to one’s benefactors. While at the end we do not know what her future will be, it is certain that her courage will be needed and her perception of people’s true motives may well make the difference for her survival.
Avril Carruthers, 25th September 2002
|
 Printable Version
|
Do you agree/disagree with this review of Happy Times (Xingfu Shiguang)? Let your opinions be heard in our forum.
|
Buy the Poster of Happy Times (Xingfu Shiguang) (Click Here)
|
|
|
|
