As one of the most reputable TV drama directors in South Korea, An Pan-seok wins not by ratings, but by his unique narrative style and ability to dig deep into reality. He is most familiar to domestic audiences for his "Love Trilogy", " Secret Meeting ", "Beautiful Sister Who Always Treats Me to Dinner", and "Spring Night", with average ratings. This time, the new work "Graduation" directed by An Panxi was broadcast after "The Queen of Tears" which set a TV ratings record. The ratings are still not of the same magnitude. Halfway through the plot, the ratings of "Graduation" hovered between 4% and 5%.
"Graduation" poster in Hong Kong, China
But this still does not damage An Panxi's status, nor does it mean that "Graduation" is a bad work. It’s just that An Panxi’s works have always appealed to the audience.
"Graduation" tells the story of the relationship between Seo Hye-jin (played by Jung Ryeo-won), a senior lecturer at Daechi-dong cram school in Gangnam-gu, Seoul, and Lee Jun-ho (played by Wei Hwa-jun), a former student and current colleague who reappeared in front of her after 10 years. love story.
Seo Hye-jin (played by Jung Ryeo-won)
Lee Jun-ho (played by Wei Hwa-jun)
Although "Graduation" is essentially a love story, Ahn Pan-seok's romance work is different from 99% of romance idol Korean dramas.
An Panxi not only focuses on love, but is also good at embedding love stories into extremely real life backgrounds, making the plot not only an emotional entanglement, but also a vivid description of daily life, touching and exploring various realistic issues in modern society. , full of profound insights into social structure and human nature.
So, before love, "Graduation" is about the workplace, the education system and women.
An Panxi's love has always focused on ordinary people and is rooted in concrete life, rather than the castles in the air of idol dramas. Before viewing "Graduation" as a love drama, you can view it as a workplace drama focusing on the ecology of cram school teachers.
Xu Huizhen is a Chinese language lecturer in a cram school with more than ten years of experience. Although she is the signature of the cram school, Xu Huizhen faces a series of real and specific workplace problems.
In cram schools, teachers need to continuously improve students' scores to prove their teaching effectiveness in order to maintain or improve their positions and income. Xu Huizhen is under great pressure.
Xu Huizhen is a famous teacher, but famous teachers have the troubles of famous teachers, and the boss of the cram school is wary of her. He is worried that Xu Huizhen's personal influence exceeds that of the cram school. Once she leaves, she will take away a large number of students, resulting in a significant drop in the number of students and income of the cram school.
Fierce competition among peers is also a major source of pressure. Daechi-dong, South Korea, where the story is set, is the famous "cram school street" in South Korea. With so many cram schools on the market, there is fierce competition among them. Teachers must compete for the limited number of students and find ways to attract and retain students.
Daechi-dong, South Korea, is a famous tutoring street in South Korea.
When workplace elements appear in Ahn Pan-seok's love dramas, it is never a dispensable background, but the protagonist really works there. Most of the scenes take place in cram schools. In addition to specific and tedious work pressures, there are also intricate interpersonal relationships and undercurrents of conflicts of interest. Conversations between characters are often full of profound meanings, and simple greetings or casual comments contain subtle unspoken workplace rules.
The workplace life in the drama is very real
"Graduation" not only shows the daily work of cram school teachers, but also digs into the particularities of the industry, and also analyzes the educational system, social structure and values behind it.
Therefore, this is also an educational drama that sharply reflects the Korean education system.
The education system in East Asia generally cannot get rid of the "score first" approach.In the words of another famous cram school teacher in the play: "A multiple-choice question worth a high score will secretly determine your level, and that level may become your standard for standing in society, the university you want to go to, The job you have, and even the appearance of the person you meet at a social gathering, may all be tied to a multiple-choice question in the school exam..."
We all know that this "scores first" educational philosophy is wrong. , we all know the "big truth" that the essence of education is to promote the all-round development of people; however, it is difficult for us to deny that in the face of an increasingly solidified class (many details in the play satirize South Korea's class solidification) and in the face of high competition In today's educational environment, performance has become the primary criterion for evaluating students, teachers, and even educational institutions.
"Graduation" has considerable narrative ambitions. It tries to think about: If there is no way to overturn the concept of "scores first" for the time being, is there a healthier and more humanistic education method?
Our heroine Xu Huizhen is in the double dilemma of career and education.
An Panxi has never been shy about saying that in his works, women must be the first protagonists. "Men have their own pains, and women also have their own pains. In our society, women's life situation is so far more difficult. Movies, TV dramas and novels In the TV series, people with difficult lives automatically become the protagonists. Therefore, women are more important in TV series because women are in a more difficult situation. "In the previous "Love Trilogy", An Panxi deeply explored the role of women in the workplace, family and society. challenges faced.
"Graduation" is no exception. From her student days to a few years before she started working, Xu Huizhen had to help her family pay off debts and had no life of her own. After becoming financially independent, Xu Huizhen still continued to live a gyro-like life. She was lonely and lost.
"Graduation" uses the alienation of Xu Huizhen's educational philosophy to reflect her loss. Workplace pressure and educational environment forced Xu Huizhen to abandon her original intention of education, and she also became a "score-first" person.
Back then, the reason why Seo Hye-jin made Lee Jun-ho, who had the second-lowest grade, fall in love with learning and eventually get admitted to Korea University, a prestigious university, was because of her more humane and inspiring teaching strategies. The method of teaching Korean reading questions appears repeatedly in the drama. Xu Huizhen's method in the past was not to indoctrinate dogmatically or require students to memorize by rote, but to first teach students to learn to read, enjoy the beauty of reading, and then fall in love with reading, so that students can also enjoy the fun and joy of reading when taking exams. A sense of accomplishment. She advocates a teaching model that stimulates students' intrinsic motivation and encourages students to explore the unknown based on interest and curiosity.
Once upon a time, Xu Huizhen’s humanistic education method inspired Li Junhao’s enthusiasm for learning
In other words, even under the framework of exam-oriented education, teachers still have space and responsibility to innovate and optimize teaching methods, and strive to provide students with both A learning environment that can adapt to examination requirements and promote all-round development.
However, after more than ten years in the big dyeing vat, under the pressure of performance appraisal, competition from peers, and the influence of the education system, Xu Huizhen gave up on implementing teaching that promotes students' all-round development but is not necessarily directly related to score improvement. As she continued her activities, she gradually became a "score-first" person.
Although she still insists on being right at certain moments (such as arguing with a public school teacher over the answer to a question), in the cram school, she said to the students, "You don't have to empathize with the narrator, anyway. You can’t relate to it, right. Just memorize it. I told you why you need to study, just to solve the problems. Okay, let’s quickly sort out the questions that will be asked in the exam...”
Xu Huizhen is also using the cramming education method.
At this moment, she is a utilitarian, authoritative, and tacky cram school teacher-just like when she learned that Li Junhao wanted to leave a big company and join a cram school, she crossed the line and interfered. She becomes an unknowingly brutal "authoritative figure."
Only then did An Panxi finally talk about love. It was in such a tedious, exhausting, and unbearable reality that our heroine met him and fell in love.
From "Love Trilogy" to "Graduation", An Panxi's belief in love has always been the same, and the reason for love is "self-saving".
friend analyzed Xu Huizhen’s mentality of “looking down on love”, which is quite popular among elite women. But An Panxi still firmly believes in love.
In a love relationship, he always becomes her mirror, reflecting her own strengths and weaknesses. Through his eyes, she gets to know herself more clearly, her needs, fears, dreams, and limitations. Love prompts her to face her true self, giving her the opportunity for self-improvement and growth. Therefore, she gave up the more attractive conditions offered by other cram schools, just to be responsible to the students who trusted her.
Xu Huizhen gradually regains her original intention
But don't get me wrong, this does not mean that An Panxi's relationship between men and women is "he saves her". The framework of "Graduation" is somewhat similar to "The Beautiful Sister Who Always Treats Me to Dinner": he was the first to fall in love with her, and it was she who still kept her original intention at that time who moved him, saved him, and made him secretly fall in love... only to meet again many years later. She became disgraced under the pressure of social life, and gradually lost her original intention, courage and vigor. She met him again and met her original self.
In "Graduation", when he appeared with the courage and vigor she taught him, it rekindled her deep thinking about the original intention and nature of education, allowing her to achieve "self-salvation", find her lost self, and become Be a better version of yourself and become a better educator. Love is just a tailwind, and she is always the helmsman of life; she fell in love with him, but it can also be said that she just found her better self.
As always, An Panxi is intoxicating in creating a love atmosphere. He is good at creating an atmosphere that is indescribable but has strong emotional contagion. Whether it is the keen capture and poetic treatment of details, the carefully designed scene layout and use of light, or the choice of background music, the emotional state of the characters can be perfectly integrated with the environment, creating an emotional space that makes people understand. The audience feels the subtle, restrained and strong mutual attraction between the characters in the seemingly ordinary story.
The love scenes in the drama are full of atmosphere
In today's film and television market, which is full of fast-food love stories, the works of director An Panxi are a breath of fresh air and unique. He did not follow the trend to create those romantic plots full of fierce conflicts and fast pace, but chose a more delicate and real path - showing the daily love in the difficult and complex social reality, and describing the love belief in the tired life. This creative choice is a gentle rebellion against current market trends and a gentle response to the deep emotional longings in the hearts of those viewers who still believe in love.
