The keywords of film and television dramas in recent years are inseparable from these three words:
big heroine.
filmed one film after another and hit the hot searches one after another.
is the orientation of the audience, the mainstream of the market, and a good way of marketing, but it often becomes a fake sign that sells people the wrong thing.
TVBās āNews Queenā is a hit.
While other dramas are still stuck in the spoiled-wife mentality of "What's wrong with my boyfriend because he's rich?", this drama quickly broke out of the entertainment industry by saying that the most cruel thing to humiliate a woman is "find a man and marry her."
Women's ambitions and abilities are intertwined, and love is just a seasoning that can be thrown away. This kind of drama relies on the support of peers to make the audience feel like nectar.
but.
is not that interesting.
Sheda Muqiang uses bitterness as the background, which is vulgar; the logic of palace struggle ends with peacelove, which is cowardly; digging into the news but not attacking deeper structural issues is shallow.
Douban score rose from 7.9 to 8.2, and then dropped from 8.2 to 7.9.
TVB only learned seven points from the past.
Just seeing Charmaine Sheh's face, I thought of those two films above 90% -
"The Golden Bough" in 2004 and "Fire in the Yellow Sand" in 2006.
The two pedicles on one stem, the two trees on one branch.
The same director, the same screenwriter, and almost the same team of people. 20 years ago when womenās issues were not yet hot, TVB had already created the template for female-led dramas.
Then, it will be difficult to defeat and chase those who come.
Beginning Ā· Mountains of bones and forgotten surnames
"The Desire of the Golden Branches" and "Fire Dance in the Yellow Sand" both begin with the death of a woman.
The former, Qing Dynasty, deep in the inner courtyard of the palace.
The concubine heard that the emperor was about to die and the concubines were going to be buried, so she sneaked out of the palace. Unexpectedly, the rumor was false, and she was caught by Concubine Ru and hanged with white silk.
The latter, the Republic of China, Huangsha Village.
A widow was accused of having an affair with another man. The tribesmen sentenced her to "lighting a sky lantern", that is, burning her alive.
The posture of suffering is a symbol.
Women are guilty of infidelity.
The two dramas were covered in blood at the beginning. Everyone was exiled into a closed arena, and they were ruled by dead objects that flashed through the camera -
The emperor's hat, the imperial memorial arch.
When most dramas are still ensuring the purity of the protagonist, "The Golden Branch" is the perfect tense of blackening, Charmaine Sheh and the beautiful lady played by Gigi Lai enter the palace together.
They are sworn friends with Jinlan one second, and they are hurting each other the next second.
No one is naive, he is a believer in the law of the jungle.
They want to share the favor of the same person.
In addition, the queen is cunning and scheming, and the concubine is ruthless and domineering. The girls in the six palaces all show their beauty. Whoever has no blood on his hands will have no wrongdoer under his throne.
"What makes people fight hard is not the flowers in front of them, but the abyss behind them."
If "News Queen" focuses on "coolness".
So "The Desire of the Golden Branch" has never tried to do this. It is a plot entwined with calculations, and conspiracy stumbles upon conspiracy. One moment of success cannot be exchanged for this moment of pride, and no one is happy.
On the poster, Four Days and Two Lives, the perspective changes, and there is no absolute protagonist.
It first says that there are no innocent people, and then says that "everyone is sinful, and no one is innocent."
has both the appearance of Yama and a compassionate heart.
The four female protagonists fell in love with the imperial doctor and the guards, but no one fell in love with the emperor, the embodiment of imperial power. The body was dedicated to ambition, and the soul guarded the relationship.
A man's love is torn apart.
It is difficult for a woman to make up her mind.
Fighting comes and goes, the queen is still the queen, and the concubine is still the concubine.
"The Desire of the Golden Branch" is about dissecting a corpse that has been frozen for thousands of years.
This corpse is immortal even though it is dead.
"Fire Dancing in the Yellow Sand" is the blood inheritance of "The Golden Branch". The emperor is gone, but the imperial memorial arch still stands on the earth.
Reproduction is a woman's only performance.
Spirit and body must serve the ancestral precepts of chastity.
Charmaine Sheh and Gigi Lai play the roles of Ch'un Equinox and Ming Feng, the women who "go up the mountain". "Going up the mountain" is an honor and means marrying into a wealthy family. Vern Equinox marries into the Song family as a concubine, and Ming Feng marries into the Yan family as his wife.
She was born with a severed hand on the vernal equinox, and was criticized as unknown by fortune tellers:
"If you have a hard life, you will never see a white-headed man in your life; if you have a red apricot, you will be childless and sick in bed."
She is foolishly loyal to ethics and obsessed with feudalism. She also participated in the persecution of herself, so she married as a concubine. Her husband was impotent, and her husband's family asked other men to "seed" her in order to continue their incest.
The vernal equinox is a moving stove, a cup for sexual desire, and a container for reproduction.
Only not herself.
The proposition of the vernal equinox is to go down the mountain, while the proposition of Mingfeng is to go up the mountain.
Mingfeng is an outlier.
A well-educated woman who married into a wealthy feudal family did not ask for respect, but only asked for a letter of divorce.
If you don't stop, she will say: "If you don't stop me tomorrow, I will burn your big house. If you don't stop me the day after tomorrow, I will burn your factory."
After being slapped and beaten, she drew a knife and stabbed him. Okay, you If you are cruel, I will be more cruel than you.
Many viewers wonder why such a woman is willing to stay with her husband until she grows old.
Because she loved.
Her love is not surrendered, but out of compassion, not passive, but autonomous. In this relationship, she is the subject, not the object.
But even if the case is brought together, it is difficult to settle the matter.
Second-rate dramas talk about logic, while first-rate dramas talk about destiny. No one walks on plain ground, no one has everything they want, they are always incomplete, always broken.
Today, when happy-ending is the standard configuration of domestic products, it captures fate:
"Ask the sky, how many happy men and women are there?"
As the Greek proverb quoted by Yu Hua: Destiny's view is more accurate than ours.
in Ā· I donāt know when the wind and rain will stop
There is no shortage of careerists in "The Desire of the Golden Branch". Everyone is a slave of desire, and power is sometimes more fascinating than sex.
For example, Kong Wu.
is a grassroots climber who knows too well that "if you want to gain power, you must be a lackey of power", so he designs to burn down the palace and performs a fire-fighting drama on his own.
If Liu Lianzi drew lessons from "The Legend of Zhen Huan" when writing "The Legend of Zhen Huan", the character settings all have corresponding points, but it is difficult to find traces of Kong Wu.
even said that people like Kong Wu are almost extinct in costume dramas.
He has done a good job in protecting the emperor, but he also wants to turn things upside down.
The imperial concubine had a difficult childbirth, and a crow smashed into the statue of Guanyin delivering her child. However, because crows had a high status in the Manchu Qing Dynasty, the little palace maid present was the scapegoat and died.
Life is worse than that of an animal.
Kong Wu hid the flute of the little palace maid behind the tablet in the Fengxian Hall. He asked the masters of the Forbidden City to kowtow to the palace maid every time they worshiped their ancestors.
"The Desire of the Golden Branch" is to impact and shatter the old solidity -
order, hierarchy, and imperial power.
However, Zhen Huan was so angry with Yongzheng that he dealt with the queen. The fight was to the end, but she still could not escape the influence of power. When Zhen Huan was in "yellow robe" and lay on the bed, flashbacks to the past occurred.
Power occupies the soul and makes the body tired.
is a copycat imitation of imperial power, about the winner being king.
And "The Desire of the Golden Branch" has got rid of the logic of success and failure. It wants to say:
Go out and don't look back.
Thatās why the concubines took the bold step of escaping from the palace.
As for Concubine Ru who chose to stay in the palace, she entered the palace at the age of sixteen and only learned how to plan and fight. It was not that she did not want to leave, but that she had no ability to leave:
"This is my home and my tomb."
Such as Concubine is so complicated.
She did not know how many people she had harmed. She once did not believe in retribution from gods and Buddhas, but later she knelt down in the snow and prayed to heaven to exchange her life for her daughter's life.
But once her daughter died, she then used a stove to heat her daughter's body, just to hold her in front of the emperor and perform a show, so that the emperor could feel the dissipation of her body temperature and feel guilty for her.
Her own flesh and blood must pay for her ambition.
The prototype of Rufei actually lived to be 74 years old.
But the screenwriter did not think she was the winner, so he fixed the ending in two scenes, the carriage away from the palace, and the concubine looking out of the palace wall.
She murmured:
If you don't love willows on the palace wall, you will only be misled by the front. When the flowers bloom and fall, they will always rely on the emperor. There is no way to go, and there is no way to live. If there is a boat on the river, I would like to go with you.
What she got was not what she wanted.
If you want to destroy it, you must make it crazy.
In the second half of "Fire Dance in the Yellow Sand", there is a crazy old man. She vows to eliminate all evil men and women, and finally falls down and dies under the archway.
She is the personification of the death of the old order.
Itās just that now, there is no whipping of power, it is all lust for power. There are always feudal defenders, but it is difficult to find destroyers.
End Ā· It would be a waste of time to enter the mortal world
The writer Mao Jian once gave a speech. She said:
"Film and television dramas are the most feudal place in China. Appearance is always distributed according to status and property, and morality is distributed according to appearance. and the future."
deeply agrees.
From "Sweet Honey" to "Three Lives Three Worlds", from "Canglan Jue" to "Ningan Like a Dream", the male and female protagonists have the best looks in the world (in terms of setting), and their status is invincible in all directions.
Right out suppresses common people, having money is better than having no money.
She continued:
"Are the poor more likely to be corrupted? It may be yes, but it must be the rich who start to corrupt first."
In the last episode of "The Golden Branch", the Tianli Sect revolted, the emperor fled, and the common people entered the palace. .
The palace Dou Quan built before | Dou Quan suddenly collapsed, leaving only broken walls and ruins, like a dream.
This is the harshest slap to power.
It was already foreshadowed. In the first episode, the beautiful lady entered the palace and met the Tenri Sect. To save her life, she left the tributes on the carriage for them to snatch.
A box of lemongrass can buy a car of lives. The protagonists cheered and rejoiced in the car.
They had not yet understood the hunger of the refugees until public complaints hit the Qianqing Palace.
And what about "Fire Dancing in the Yellow Sand"?
Horse thieves entered the stronghold, and the Japanese army looked at them and fled in all directions. The faith and order in the past were fragile. The ancestral rules were no match for fast guns and cannons, and violence was defeated by violence.
The world has changed, and the Colosseum has collapsed.
At this level, few dramas can achieve it, but at the next level, it is even more difficult to achieve.
When interpreting "A Dream of Red Mansions", people often like to compare history. The most popular theory is that Cao Xueqin secretly writes about the king and metaphors the court. Among the twelve hairpins in Jinling, this hairpin is an official and that hairpin is a general...
Cao Xueqin Although it is written in a historical style, it has already been shown that it was a biography of a woman in the boudoir.
I don't want to believe it. Is it too small to have a "boudoir" style?
Same thing.
Regardless of "Golden Branches Desire" or "Fire Dancing in the Yellow Sand", history is overwhelming, and in the end it is still written about women, and it is written for women.
"The Desire of the Golden Branch", on the carriage leaving the palace, two noble people, Er Chun and An Qian, were sitting. Er Chun was confused in her heart, feeling that the world was vast and she had nowhere to go. An Qian was hit by an arrow in the back and was in danger. She told Er Chun:
Her hometown is her hometown, and her folks are her folks.
"Fire Dance in the Yellow Sand", when the horse thief attempts to rape the vernal equinox, Xiaoqin, who is being insulted, calls her to jump off a cliff and kill herself in order to save her reputation.
The Vernal Equinox once regarded chastity as her fate, and the archway judged her, punished her, and suppressed her, but at this moment, she screamed to the heaven and the earth and tore her clothes.
I would rather be humiliated than live.
This scene shakes the soul.
Thousands of reds cry, and thousands of beauties share the same sorrow.
There is no heroine here who is "big" for the sake of being "big".
The heroines do not rely on piling up golden sentences or relying on ruthlessness. They not only focus on their ambitions, skills, and intelligence, but also do not shy away from their weakness, overthinking, hesitation, and failure.
In his review of "A Dream of Red Mansions", Wang Guowei once wrote that "he was deeply entangled and had already planted the seeds of liberation." This can be used to interpret the endings of these two dramas.
The highest point of the struggle is that it is boring, and the highest point of resistance is "suddenly opening the golden rope, only then do you know that I am who you are."
The end is the source, come by carriage and leave by carriage.
One of the best songs in the soundtrack of "The Desire of the Golden Branch", it has music but no words, just like the fate of the mortal daughter in the play, it is sung three times and needs no further words.
is just that.
The wind is always blown away by the rain and wind.
How long do we have to wait for the next drama like this?
Supervised by: Inspector
