The director of Ju Dou, To Live, and Not One Less, China’s Zhang Yimou is a brilliant master.  Small, amusing and sad, his Happy Times (2002) concentrates on a shortchanged person, a pared-down life—that of Wu Ying, a girl made blind by a brain tumor and treated ignobly by her husband-less stepmother.  The man who wishes to marry the stepmother is Zhao, a fiftyish loser of sorts so tired of bachelorhood that he lies to the stepmother about owning a big hotel.  Stirred by this, the woman asks Zhao to hire Wu Ying as a hotel masseuse; she wants the girl out of the way.  Hence Zhao rigs up a phony massage room and leads Wu to believe she is servicing customers who are in reality Zhao’s helpful friends.  The unseeing girl enjoys the “work” and considers these brief days the happiest of her life.

In this film one deprived soul immorally uses another deprived soul.  The lying little man is luckless, but the blind Wu Ying is more so, and yet Zhao does do something for the girl.  Indeed he can even be very kind to her; such paradoxes!  Largely, though, he is merely kind to himself, and things go into a tailspin.  For Wu, is it only through deception that happy times can be had?  What’s more, self-deception appears to plague both characters.

Zhao Benshan is capital as Zhao with lower-class ordinariness and ingenuous appeal, believable as a puritanical bachelor.  Dong Jie is absolutely winning with Wu Ting’s guilelessness and forbearance, but is not a cardboard saint.  Zhang’s direction is standard but careful and felt, perhaps reflecting an admiration for contemporary Iranian filmmakers.  Happy Times has heart; it has the heart of Not One Less, quite different from Zhang’s earlier great, nigh depressing pictures, although some might find Happy Times depressing too.

(In Mandarin with English subtitles)

Happy Times (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Cover of The Illusionist [Blu-ray]

I got bored with Steven Millhauser’s short story, “Eisenheim the Illusionist,” and so stopped reading it.  I’m glad it was transferred to the screen, however, for there is much to love in this curious movie.  Norton’s Eisenheim works as a mind-boggling illusionist in 19th-century Vienna and is in love with Sophie von Teschen (Jessica Biel), the aristocratic inamorata of a callous prince (Rufus Sewell).  Illusions are everywhere in the film, all performed by Eisenheim—unless the illusions are real.  Burger keeps us guessing.  What the whole of Vienna believes to be reality, in fact, turns out to be a happy falsehood.

The film uses a couple of the iris-outs so appreciated by director Francois Truffaut, and indeed The Illusionist greatly resembles Truffaut’s period pieces, e.g. The Story of Adele H., though without the customary charm.  Cinematographer Dick Pope’s lighting cannot be improved on; truly the film has a look.  Prague nicely stands in for Vienna, and the costumes of Ngila Dickson are unpretentiously agreeable.  Philip Glass’s score is respectable if sometimes shopworn.

The film is entertaining as well as marred by plenty of flaws.  For one thing, it’s a bit plebeian, and for another, I wish Jessica Biel’s acting had more sparkle, more imagination, for all her good looks.

Larry Peerce’s Goodbye Columbus (1969) is a Hollywood movie for adults since the Philip Roth story from which it derives is a novella for adults.  It is well known that it has to do with the attitude of rich American Jews toward low-income Jews (and vice versa), but when Peerce isn’t proving what a romantic he is, he is imposing on us some ugly, very raffish, and insulting satire.  Romantic?  Yes, in the scenes where Neil and Brenda, falling in love, are together, and these can be pleasant.  Richard Benjamin and Ali MacGraw enact the lovers with savvy and heart.  But Goodbye Columbus is pushy and fails to adequately convey the ultimate meaning of Roth’s story (in the diaphragm sequence).  It is, I think, worth seeing but just barely.

Goodbye, Columbus (film) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Except for its specious final minutes, 1946’s The Blue Dahlia, written by Raymond Chandler, is a smashing crime picture.  A horrid, unfaithful woman (Doris Dowling) whom no man truly loves is murdered, and Johnny Morrison (Alan Ladd), her husband and an ex-military officer, tries to find the killer.  He himself is a suspect, but so is the smooth club owner Eddie Harwood (Howard Da Silva)—the “lover” of Dowling and the husband of a character played by Veronica Lake (my gosh, he’s cheating on Veronica Lake!?)—and the irritable, mentally unbalanced veteran, Buzz (William Bendix).

With his foursquare direction, George Marshall and his cast have delivered a sober, classy but not too classy melodrama.  Chandler’s fine dialogue means little in the mouth of Alan Ladd, dull and Shane-like as he is, but it means a lot coming from the memorable Da Silva, Dowling, Will Wright, et al.  Lake, who is serviceable, is perfect-looking; Bendix, who is unhandsome, is scary.  Have fun.

Bed and Board (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Francois Truffaut made Bed and Board (Domicile Conjugal, 1970) to show us his autobiographical character, Antoine Doinel—a former juvenile delinquent—as a married man with a child.  Casually he tosses in the revelation that Antoine (Jean-Pierre Leaud) is often selfish, and drama would be absent from the film had he not had Antoine cheat on his wife (Claude Jade) with a Japanese woman.

Less successful than Truffaut’s other Antoine Doinel pictures, Bed is nevertheless pleasurable with its slight goofiness and, well, essentially meaningless high spirits.  It is usually the equivalent of a Paul McCartney love song, except that it’s pretty risqué.  The Story of Adele H. it ain’t.

(In French with English subtitles)