"Happy Times" is a great film with a plot that changes as the story develops. It starts with Zhao, a retired factory worker who is constantly trying to find himself a wife. He is extremely desperate and almost foolish at times in the ways in which he tries to get women to marry him. Zhao doesn't have much money and when he meets a woman, who is a stepmother with 2 children, who wants to marry him and have a wedding that will cost 50,000 yuan. He foolishly begins lying and tells her that he is a wealthy person and that 50,000 yuan should be no problem. Zhao goes to his friends, fellow retired factory workers, and asks them to lend him money for the wedding. They tell him no because he has borrowed money in the past for this same reason. Zhao's friend however comes up with a business proposal involving an old bus in the woods behind the factory where young lovers go since they have no other place. The two men fix up the bus and make it romantic and charge people to use the bus for privacy.
Meanwhile the stepmother tells Zhao to find her blind step-daughter a job at the "hotel" since she doesn't want her living in her house anymore. Zhao then takes the blind girl Little Wu to find her a job. Along the way things happen that make this very hard, especially when his bus is removed by a cleaning crew. In fear of disappointing his future wife he tells Little Wu a series of lies to keep the impression going that he owns a beautiful hotel. In order to get Little Wu a job, Zhao and his friends build Little Wu a fake massage parlor in the middle of their old factory. Zhao takes her to work at the massage parlor and has all of his friends go in as clients.
It is at this point that Zhao stops doing all this to impress his future wife and starts doing it for little Wu because he feels sorry for her and wants her to succeed. The two start bonding and eventually become like father and daughter through their experiences together. Near the end of the film Zhao goes to bring the stepmother flowers and when he opens the door she is kissing another man. There is an argument between Zhao and the stepmother and he is told to leave. Brokenhearted he begins drinking and talking to himself when he says something about the stepmother being fat, a rather fat man is walking by who takes offense and punches Zhao in the face. Zhao goes to a restaurant and writes Little Wu a letter. He then leaves he restaurant and on the way back is hit by a truck while crossing the street.
He is unconscious in the hospital when his friends come to see him. They do however get a hold of the note he wrote to Little Wu. They then go back to the house where Little Wu has been staying, only to find a note and a tape recorder. They play the tape and it is little Wu saying goodbye. She tells them that she knew it all along that the massage parlor was fake and that the money they were giving her was not real but at the same time she is very happy that they did that for her because it made her feel important. The take gets to the end when Zhao's friend rewinds it plays it again and reads the letter aloud over the tape. It is in the letter where Zhao writes to Little Wu as her father. This is a touching moment and the film ends from there.
The story of Zhao changes throughout the film. He realizes late through his experiences with little Wu that the whole time he was searching for a wife to fulfill his needs it really wasn't that at all. What Zhao needed was love. There are many types of love out there and the kind that Zhao found with Little Wu is genuine unlike the love he had been trying to find with the women he was trying to marry. Little Wu at the same time needed to feel important to someone. It was Zhao who she found that feeling in. He treated her like an equal and went out of his way to make her life better and give her something that she was good at for once in her life.
This is truly a story of people finding one another on a different scale than you see in most films dealing with love. Usually there are two people who fall in love get married and live happily ever after. This film was not the mushy love that you see in romantic movies but rather the genuine love shared between a father and his daughter. I really enjoyed the story and they way that it ended. It seems that you rarely find endings like that in American film. I think that American films always have to fix everything in the conclusion of the film so that everything is perfect before the credits come on the screen. But leaving Zhao in the hospital and Little Wu on her journey, still allows you to feel happy for both of them for what they have gained through their relationship.
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