Stills from "City Within a City".
"City Within a City" starring Bai Yufan and Yu Hewei is being broadcast on CCTV's prime time slot. As the first financial urban drama to appear on the screen, "City Within a City" has a wide-ranging story at the beginning, but the core master-apprentice plot has not been able to get to the point, resulting in insufficient drama and difficulty in hooking the audience. It was not until ten episodes later that the core story of "City Within a City" was officially launched and revealed the temperament of a human drama.
html Since the beginning of 2000, Shanghai + Finance has become a big hit on the screen. The three financial-themed works " Blossoms ", "Wind Chaser" and "City within the City" have been broadcast in succession, jointly composing the history of Shanghai, the financial city. past and present. Interestingly, these three dramas have invariably created three pairs of "mentor and apprentice" pairs in the financial circle, and the most effective way for the audience to "enter the drama" is to become involved in the relationship between the characters.For example, in the just-concluded financial spy drama "Storm Chaser", the first two episodes of the onboarding story establish the relationship between Wei Ruolai and Shen Tunan as teachers and friends. The two are both mentors and apprentices, and also like-minded confidants. In the fifth episode, when Wei Ruolai was ordered to protect the treasury and was beaten to a bloody head, the audience was able to empathize with it and take on the perspective of Shen Tunan's master-disciple relationship while reproaching and feeling distressed at the same time.
On the other hand, "City Within a City" did not focus on the main character relationship in the opening stage. At the beginning of the series, Tao Wuji (played by Bai Yufan) returned to the front-line counter of the bank after being selected by Zhao Hui (played by Yu Hewei) for pre-loan investigation. From then on, the plot tells the story of Zhao Hui being hunted by capital as the vice president, and Tao Wuji struggling as a new banker. The story progresses in two levels, from bank executives to ordinary employees. The plot of
revolves around the workplace and life of two generations of financial people, depicting all living beings in the industry, and uses a long space to outline the career panorama of financial people. While multiple branch plots are unfolding, the master-disciple relationship in the main plot has not yet entered the core story. In the plot currently aired, Zhao Hui is still just the professional idol in Tao Wuji's mouth. In contrast, the opening of "City Within a City", which is also a "two-hero narrative", is not as good as that of "Storm Chaser", allowing the audience to quickly feel the "chemical reaction" between the two male protagonists, master and apprentice.
"City Within the City" is called "Uncle Circle Team Building" because it brings together many powerful actors, but the beauty of the TV series lies in its "drama". To a certain extent, film and television stories are also a narrative art of "expectation management", which is to guide expectations by grasping the audience's psychology, so that the audience will have expectations and be unable to stop. Wonderful stories are the process of managing expectations and breaking expectations.
The opening chapter of "City Within a City" gives people the feeling of a running account, because the plot is spread out too widely through scattered perspective, there are many emotional dramas, and there are many unreasonable coincidences. It pursues a bank career drama with a "class flavor", but it does not let The audience really sees the main line and core of the story clearly. The audience has no idea about the direction of the story, and they are unable to build up expectations. It wasn't until the plot used Zhao Hui's psychological imbalance as the "inciting incident" in the narrative that the calmness and boredom of the story's preparation stage were broken.
As the vice president of Shenmao Bank Branch, Zhao Huijie takes care of himself. He has worked hard and devoted himself for many years, seeking neither fame nor profit, just to live up to his responsibilities and feelings as a banker. His daughter may be blind due to eye disease. Faced with a surgery fee of two million US dollars, Zhao Hui would rather borrow money from friends and sell his house to raise funds than leave a chance to a "good brother" who needs a loan. Xie Zhiyuan, chairman of the trust company, thought he knew the weaknesses of his old classmates and sent Zhou Lin, who looked exactly like Zhao Hui's late wife, to his door. However, Zhao Hui saw through the "beauty trap" at a glance.
Faced with heavy pressure and various temptations, Zhao Hui seems to be perfect, but his real weakness is revealed by his old classmate Su Jianren: "Everything written on my face is that I want to climb up, but I just put on an air and show my feelings. "Zhao Hui originally thought he was sure of the appointment of the new president, but he didn't expect that a president would come parachuting in and continue to make things difficult and suppress him, and try to share the cake.
"City within a city" refers to the international financial center known as the "Manhattan of the East". It is both a city of ideals and a city of desire. People in the city will more or less be in a perspective of "staring into the abyss".In the play, a series of encounters impacted Zhao Hui's career bottom line. Zhao Hui finally couldn't restrain his inner desires and began to wander between black and white. As the plot advances to this point, it is no longer a conventional anti-corruption story. The intense drama of finance's alienation of human nature, "one thought becomes a Buddha" and "one thought becomes a devil" is immediately before our eyes.
"City within a City" completely breaks the protagonist's life balance through the "appointment of a new president", catalyzes the protagonist's motivation, provides story motivation, and then stimulates the audience's expectations for "the dragon slayer will eventually become the evil dragon" , attracting the audience into the fate of the characters, such a story is both novel and "playful". A good story needs an "inciting incident" to start. After a lengthy story preparation, the next plot of "City Within a City" will officially enter the master-disciple story line, gradually kicking off the drama of human nature. (Beijing Daily reporter Qiu Wei)
