news

①②: Six days after the release of the film Dream of Red Mansions, the cumulative box office of the film was less than 5 million yuan, and the total number of viewers was about 140,000. Compared with the dismal market response, the controversy on various social platforms can be said to be boiling. ③: Lin Daiyu played by Chen Xiaoxu in the 1987 version. Map: Li Jie

Casting, script, set design, costumes, props, special effects, filters... It is rare that a movie is faced with almost all-round doubts as soon as it is released.

On August 16, the movie "A Dream of Red Mansions: A Golden Marriage" (hereinafter referred to as "A Golden Marriage") was released. Six days later, the cumulative box office of the film was less than 5 million yuan, and the total number of viewers was about 140,000. Compared with the dismal market response, the controversy on various social platforms can be said to be boiling. On the one hand, netizens mocked the topic of "One Dai is not as good as another Dai" and made it to the top of the hot search list, and the film's reputation was badly overturned; on the other hand, the film's director Hu Mei published a long article accusing some accounts of deliberately attacking the film and using AI to post negative reviews.

The more attention there is on the film and television adaptation of classical masterpieces, the greater the controversy, especially "Dream of Red Mansions". "The paper is full of nonsense and bitter tears. Everyone says the author is crazy, but who can understand the meaning?" Hu Mei has expressed her feelings about "The Golden Marriage" many times. Her creation is intended to "throw a brick to attract jade", hoping to use a modern perspective to guide the young Internet generation to open the original work because of the movie. But now, how to understand the meaning, and even whether to "understand the meaning", have become important topics of debate on the Internet. Some netizens pointed out sharply: "We have to compete with short videos and micro-short dramas for attention, but we are led by fragmentation and shallow reading. In this era of 'lightweight' creation, we are not worthy of Cao Gong's original work."

Is the adaptation of "Dream of Red Mansions" really an unbearable burden in the era of short videos?

Casting: With so many great actors so successful so far, is a new generation of “Bao, Dai and Chai” still needed?

The controversy over "A Dream of Red Mansions" did not begin with its release. A year ago, the casting of Bao, Dai, and Chai was first revealed with the film's trailer. Each of them only appeared for two or three seconds, which did not prevent them from being ridiculed as soon as they appeared. It is said that each generation has its own aesthetics, but this sentence still swept the comment area - "There is Chen Xiaoxu in heaven, and there is no Lin Daiyu in the world." This statement is absolute, and it reveals two facts - the audience's key expectations for the film and television adaptation of "Dream of Red Mansions" are the characters; the influence of the 1987 version of "Dream of Red Mansions" spans time and generations.

Professor Zhan Dan of the Guangqi Language and Literature Research Institute of Shanghai Normal University was the first to watch the film. During the interview, he repeatedly mentioned that the actor's image and temperament should be highly consistent with the role: "Lin Daiyu is an extraordinary woman in the original novel. She is the incarnation of the Immortal Grass of the Crimson Pearl, and she is full of spirit." In terms of appearance, "two curved eyebrows that seem to be frowning but not frowning, a pair of eyes that seem to be crying but not crying, and a look of sorrow on her cheeks, and a delicate body that is sick"; in her cultural genes, the two colors of scholarly and worldly wealth are intertwined. However, judging from the limited feedback from the audience, the big screen version of Lin Daiyu "only has savagery and pettiness" and "no spirit", which is hard to live up to expectations.

In 1924, Minxin Film Company filmed and edited five Beijing operas performed by Mei Lanfang into a two-part black-and-white short film, one of which was "Daiyu Burying Flowers", which was the first time that "Dream of Red Mansions" was adapted for the big screen. In the past 100 years, the Yue Opera film starring Xu Yulan and Wang Wenjuan in 1962, the CCTV TV series directed by Wang Fulin in 1987, and the series of films directed by Xie Tieli in 1989, each of them has its own artistic merits and left a mark in the hearts of several generations. In 2010, the drama version directed by Li Shaohong was broadcast, and the character's "copper coin head" shape was controversial.

Since today's audiences always mention the 1987 version when they talk about "Dream of Red Mansions", with such a good example, is there still a need for a new generation of "Bao, Dai and Chai"? Hu Jianli, Secretary General of the New Media Committee of the Chinese Society of Literary and Art Critics, answered affirmatively: "Our understanding of the casting of 'Bao, Dai and Chai' cannot be fixed on the 1987 version forever. We do need new faces."

Narrative: Rhythm anxiety, can movies only record famous scenes?

Hu Mei once said that the positioning of "A Marriage Between Love and Fortune" is "youth". It tries to extract the love between Baoyu and Daiyu as the main line from the original work with numerous foreshadowings and a grand structure, and uses the bitterness of youthful love to reflect the sorrow of all the beauties, trying to impress young people who are said to have stopped reading big books for a long time.

In order to meet the needs of today's audiences for fast-paced narratives, the main storyline is "innovatively" set as "Jia is greedy for Lin's wealth", using Lin Ruhai's huge inheritance to build the Grand View Garden, and then breaking up the couple to cover up the conspiracy. This idea may not be wrong, but the writing is already a thousand miles away.

In "A Marriage Between Love and Fortune", the main plot is compressed into the first 20 minutes in a revolving lantern-like manner. After a few scenes and a few lines of dialogue are thrown out directly, they are put aside. Why did the Jia family try to seize the Lin family's property? How did they plot against the orphan girl? What were the different attitudes of the people in the Jia family? All these things make the story difficult to be self-consistent. Trapped by the anxiety of rhythm, the movie plunges into the browsing of the "famous scenes" in the original work after 20 minutes.

Granny Liu's visit to the Grand View Garden has little connection with the main plot of the movie, and it seems that the actor appeared on stage only to say "Old Liu, Old Liu, you eat as much as a cow"; Daiyu became jealous before Baochai entered the house, and it seemed that she had foresight just to complain to Baoyu that "there is no good brother to make cold fragrance pills with flowers and snow"; in the scene of Yuanchun's visit to her parents, Yuanchun, who appeared early in the original novel and started the plot of the Grand View Garden, was late in the movie… Netizens ridiculed that these fragments that were crushed and reorganized, with no cause and no result, were in line with the current trend of "special forces-style check-in". They just stacked the famous scenes in memory stiffly, and used the movie that was originally intended to "resist short videos" to complete a grand short video collection.

Aesthetics: As the context changes, is it ultimately the "advanced" technology that dissolves classical beauty?

An interesting phenomenon is that while "The Golden Marriage" was under attack from all sides, the 3A game "Black Myth: Wukong" based on "Journey to the West" became a hit at home and abroad almost overnight. Both games started from the four great classical novels, but their situations were so different that some people directly judged that it was no longer possible to shoot classical beauty in today's Internet context.

The film "A Marriage of Love" was launched in 2016, started shooting in 2018, and was remade in 2022. This relatively long creative experience is also the process of Chinese films from the influx of hot money to the return to rationality and the iterative upgrading of visual effects technology.

In 2016, when the project was launched, the first place in the Chinese box office was "The Mermaid" with 3.39 billion yuan. "Journey to the West: The Monkey King 3: The White Bone Demon", "Grave Robbers' Chronicles", "The Great Wall" and other films also received box office of 1 billion yuan. It was the era when Chinese fantasy blockbusters were popular. Hu Mei herself did not deny that the creative environment at that time gave her the bold idea of ​​making "The Great Illusion" into a blockbuster of gods and demons. This assumption was fulfilled in 2022, the year of technological takeoff. As a result, the original mysterious and poetic Great Illusion was exaggerated in the movie as "technology and hard work", and the strong sense of AI eventually lost the ethereal charm of the original work.

However, is it just the "advanced" technology that dissolves the beauty of classics? Not entirely. The director stressed that the art, costumes and props were all done with great care before the filming started, but after the release, the audience only saw the whole plate of suckling pig and crab on the table, and it was hard to imagine how the young lady of the aristocratic family would eat them. The details were ruined in an instant. Daiyu's burial of flowers was even more severely criticized on the Internet. Although the crew went to Linzhi, Tibet to shoot on site, when the audience saw the snow-capped mountains in the distance of the peach forest, and the pink peach forest bloomed in the colors of Abao and macaron after several layers of filters, it was no wonder that they joked that "Daiyu buried the peach blossoms of three lives and three worlds". As for the most exquisite character in "Dream of Red Mansions", it was even more absurd in "Golden Jade Marriage". Lin Daiyu became a giant baby who made things difficult for people, and Baoyu changed from a smart and elegant person who pitied girls to a greasy young man. The love between Baoyu and Daiyu should have been a friendship and like-minded, but only the online language was left with the crazy, stupid and arrogant words.

Is there a decline in aesthetics? Some scholars have bluntly stated that the fast-paced life and fragmented reading have indeed reset the cultural reception context in the new media era, but this does not mean that the younger generation's expectations for the adaptation of classical literature will only remain at "thinning out thick". On the contrary, the more it is at this time, the more it is necessary for creators to break away from the false proposition of "catering to new aesthetics" and shoot "thick" out of "thin" to lead this generation of audiences. (Wang Yan Zang Yunjie)

(Wen Wei Po)