Happy Times and the Fifth Generation

Zhang Yimou’s Happy Times is the story of an older man who is looking to get married, but cannot afford to provide his future wife with the finances she requires, and through several lies on his part, he ends up growing closer to her stepdaughter. The girlfriend character is like the evil stepmother from Cinderella, and her stepdaughter is very much like Cinderella except that she does not end up with a prince at the end. The relationship that develops between the girl and the main character is very cute. He becomes a father figure to her, when her own father is missing in another part of the country, and virtually forgotten about her. I love how these two interact with one another, and how he tries to protect her from his own girlfriend. I thought early on that this was going to be a comedy, about him trying to deceive his girlfriend with the hotel, and it would somehow all work out in the end, but then I realized that that is what would happen in an American movie, and a Chinese movie is very different from this. There are certainly comedy bits sprinkled throughout the film, but it is on whole a drama, about their relationship, and their relationships with the rest of the world. The girl has somewhat of a happy ending, going out into the world on her own, but as she is blind, this is also a very scary thing, and she is going into the unknown in more ways than one. The man ends up in the hospital, and doesn’t even get to say goodbye. One of the most moving parts of the film was when the girl left a tape recording of her goodbye message, and the friend reads the letter to her recorded message. I was pretty much crying at this point, it was very sad and beautiful. One of the interesting things about this film is that it is somewhat about the old traditional ways clashing with the new ways that are beginning to emerge in China. The man is very traditional, even when it comes to his fake business, he won’t let the young people go into the bus with the door closed. This is representative of the way he was raised, and how much of China was for many years. It is just in recent times that things have begun to loosen up. Zhang Yimou was part of the ‘Fifth Generation’ of Chinese filmmakers, and as they were the first to begin to part with the old ways, this may have something to do with that. In this film we see the differences between them, and it may be because of this unique vision that the characters are designed thus. One somewhat literal idea might be with the removal of the very red painted bus, it is a symbolic yet literal removal of the ‘red’ communism of Mao Zedong. China is still a communist government, but through time and through more liberal filmmakers like those of the ‘Fifth Generation’ and Zhang Yimou, the government grows more relaxed and lenient than in past times.