Yang and Yin

Happy Times is part Chinese Damon Runyon story and part throwback to silent-era melodrama in which vivid but deadpan characters are alternately bathed in sympathy, humor and sorrow. The script is adapted by Gui Zifrom Mo Yan’s novella Shifu, You’ll Do Anything for a Laugh. If creative talent like Yan and Runyon hadn’t learned to write, they just may have become chronic liars like Zhao (played by Zhao Benshan), the main character here, who bends and exaggerates the truth with the same natural reflex and fluidity of his next breath.

Seated in a coffee shop with a rather beefy divorcée (Dong Lihua), the unemployed, 50-something bachelor says he likes a woman with plenty of meat on her bones (“No skinny women for me!”) when in fact he has just recently super-sized his taste in ladies due to numerous rejections (18 we are soon told) by thinner nuptial candidates. The two have been brought together by a matchmaker. I have two kids, she says. “I love kids,” he responds. “The more the merrier.” Then let’s make our wedding a real event, she says. No problem, Zhao says. He believes he has met the woman of his dreams so he agrees to a ceremony well beyond his means, cracking open a bottomless Pandora’s box.

Zhao turns to his cronies for financial support. One buddy helps him fix up a city bus that has been abandoned on a wooded city lot and rent it out to lovers. He tells his betrothed that he is a wealthy hotel owner when in fact he is too old fashioned to let potential customers close the bus doors. He then meets his fiancée’s spoiled, overweight son (Leng Quibin) and bullied, blind 18-year-old stepdaughter Wu Ying (Dong Jie). His future wife badgers him into giving the forlorn girl a job as a masseuse as well as a room at the hotel. With his earlier deceit now beginning to snowball, Zhao and his retired friends concoct a scheme designed to placate the pushy gold digger and brightens Wu’s life.

Director Zhang Yimou (Shanghai Triad, Raise the Red Lantern) is known for his lush (he’s a former cinematographer) period dramas. His foray into tragi-comedy is as slight as Wu is lithe but nonetheless entertains and conjures up compassion without wallowing in pathos. One brief scene in which Zhao sneaks back into his own home and is cornered by an unknowing Wu is brilliantly choreographed. The slapstick involving a large face hole in a massage table is gingerly rather than broadly exploited. A stop on the way home from work in which Wu reads Zhao’s physical looks with her hands could have been a groaner but Yimou reverts to a pensive long shot that strengthens the interaction. The film is in Mandarin with easy to read yellow subtitles (at least on my review tape) and steers miles clear of a pat Hollywood ending.

Bensham is excellent as the lonely but stoically dignified suitor and “bullshitter” with closely cropped hair, thick eyebrows, a half-hearted moustache, a huge heart and only one nice shirt. He conveys just the right mix of tenacity and tenderness to make you care that he can’t even go on a self-pity drunk without getting punched in the eye. Jie, a professional dancer making her debut here, brings a fable-like aura to the proceedings as the abused teen waif who is optimistic her father will return with the money needed to “cure her eyes.” She parlays Wu’s blindness into a double-edged world of vulnerability and determined independence. Yimou’s previous films made a star out of Gong Li. Now Jie is on her way.

Happy Times is a bittersweet, refreshingly simple story about the domino effect of deception, loyalty of friends and power of dreams that reminds us to feel rather than just think way too much. It is life affirming and heartbreaking, sweet without the decay factor, funny and sad. It’s probably no coincidence that one of Zhao’s pals wears an orange shirt with Popeye and Olive Oyl on the chest. Zhao, without the spinach, turns out to be quite a hero, too.