news

Chen Xiaoxu interprets Lin Daiyu and understands the role thoroughly. Review of the wonderful clips in the past. She seems to have walked out of the Dream of Red Mansions

《Dream of Red Mansions: A Perfect Marriage》

Hu Mei's version ofDream of the Red Chamber”, which can be called 81 difficulties. First, the director of the drama version of Dream of Red Mansions changed, and then Hu Mei had to prepare for the film version for many years. The audience waited for a long time, and finally heard the news that the film version of Dream of Red Mansions was scheduled. But as the film was released, doubts increasingly overwhelmed expectations: Didn’t these 81 difficulties lead to the true scripture?

The film version of "A Dream of Red Mansions" is positioned as "youth". It tries to extract the love story of Baoyu and Daiyu from the original novel with thousands of foreshadowings and a grand structure, and uses the bitterness of youthful love to reflect the sorrow of all beauties, trying to impress young audiences who are said to have stopped reading big books for a long time. The idea may not be bad, but the writing is far from the truth. In the jargon, this is called poor completion.

Dream of Red Mansions: A Perfect Marriage

The original story line was broken up. Before Baochai even entered the mansion, Daiyu was jealous of her. I don’t know which prophet in the book gave her a warning. She said to Baoyu, “There is no good brother to use flowers for you.”CherThe stories of the crab feast, Granny Liu’s visit to the Grand View Garden, and the Begonia Poetry Society were all broken up and reassembled. The entire Dream of the Red Chamber was cut into pieces and made into hamburger steaks.

The relationships between the characters in the original novel were also rewritten. Baochai catching butterflies was a solitary game for a young girl, and it was the mature Baochai's hidden girlish heart that she would not easily let others see. However, the film version allowed Baoyu to participate. While the two of them were catching butterflies, Baochai was persuading Baoyu to make progress. Grandmother Jia had no love for Daiyu at all. She praised Baochai openly and secretly condoned Sister Feng to swallow up the Lin family's property. Even Daiyu's personal maid Zijuan rebelled. When Baoyu and Daiyu quarreled, Xiren tried to persuade them, but she pulled Xiren and said, "We can't do anything about it."

Not to mention the dialogues that set the tone of the story, Baoyu would express his true feelings to Daiyu, "I miss you", two maids dared to tease the young couple in the corridor, "They rolled together in a short while", and Jia Zheng, a disciple of Confucius and Mencius, cried bitterly when he saw Yuanchun who came back to visit her parents, "My child". The sentiment and mood of the original work in the language are gone. Tigers and wolves roared, and thunder rolled in the sky.

The most exquisite characters in "Dream of Red Mansions" are even more absurd in the movie. Lin Daiyu is sensitive and suspicious because she lives under someone else's roof, but she is not a giant baby who makes things difficult for others. When Zhou Ruijia sent flowers to her, she stood in front of the mirror with them on, looking left and right. When she heard that she was the last one to get the flowers, she immediately threw them to the ground with force, just like a child playing tricks, not lacking love but lacking discipline. Baoyu, who was originally a smart and elegant man who sympathized with girls, was shown in the movie version to flirt with cats and dogs everywhere, like a greasy young man and a dandy rogue.

The friendship, childhood sweethearts, and shared interests of Bao and Dai in their love story are all gone. The smart characters have all become really crazy, stupid, and arrogant.

Dream of Red Mansions: A Perfect Marriage

When I think of the hardships of the filming process, I feel even more helpless. Is "Dream of Red Mansions" difficult to shoot? It is indeed. But after all, there is the 1987 version, so why is it so difficult for us to shoot the "Dream of Red Mansions" in our hearts after so many years?

Cao Gong's book is too detailed, with detailed descriptions of the characters' clothing and courtyard furnishings, and even more delicate portrayals of the characters' psychology. The plot is tightly connected and the structure is too literary, so there is not much room for film and television adaptation. If it is written in a plain way, it will be quite difficult. There are thousands of people with different faces, and each has his own romantic charm. It is difficult to get all the twelve beauties together.

These are still minor difficulties. The most difficult thing is the innocence and elegance of the original work, which is difficult to understand and achieve in the highly industrialized and secular film and television industry.

The Dream of the Red Chamber is a book for young people, which uses the eyes, mind and emotions of young people to look at the reality that is suddenly collapsing like a building. In the rational interpretation (or secular interpretation) of contemporary adults, many of the logic, attribution and even values ​​in the book are immature and incomplete. But it is the purest reflection of the young people's hearts.

1987 version of Dream of the Red Chamber

Baoyu's compassion for women is an innocent yearning for beauty. He hopes that everyone can get together every day and sing all the time. That kind of joy and happiness is the cute childishness of not knowing the hardships of the world. Daiyu's sensitivity and suspicion are the precocity and trauma of experiencing separation too early. She saw through the empty shell of the Jia family with less income and more expenditure, and she also predicted that she would be difficult to trust for life, but she had no choice but to bow her head and bury the flowers. Baochai's ruthlessness is an insight into the impermanence of the world. On the one hand, she has the ambition to rise to the top, and on the other hand, she has to face the pain of her brothers' incompetence, the gradual decline of her family, and the inability to control her life. There are also Xiangyun, Tanchun, Qingwen, etc. They share a dream in similar ideals and predicaments. And the ending of Wanyan's tragedy is the collective destruction of the ideals of the young people, and the free souls are not free in the end.

1987 version of Dream of the Red Chamber

This youthful spirit is the most special charm of "Dream of Red Mansions".Three Kingdoms》《Water Margin》 are all easy plays to make. Intrigue, cunning and bravery can all be shown through performance, but the youthfulness alone, as in "Dream of Red Mansions", the pearl soon becomes a fish eye. Its existence, in the most intelligent and smart teenager, is only a few short years. The waves of reality will either extinguish it or sweep it away. Some people still vaguely remember it, while others have already rushed to the future.

Therefore, the most important thing in remaking "Dream of Red Mansions" is to find this kind of innocence and elegance, rather than just focusing on the external story framework of "Dream of Red Mansions" and filming the history of the decline of the Ning and Rong families, or the wonderful love between Baoyu and Daiyu.

If one is less innocent and more narcissistic, one cannot reach such a youthful state. If one is less intelligent and more cowardly, one will become Daiyu who throws silk flowers on the ground and Baoyu who is greasy and flirtatious.

Dream of Red Mansions: A Perfect Marriage

After the 1987 version, the rarely praised adaptation of "Dream of Red Mansions" reappeared. I once watched a stage play that boldly changed the twelve golden hairpins into men, and used the emotional perspective of contemporary people to deconstruct the thoughts of young people trapped in the cage of patriarchy. Without the desire for freedom and independence, and without the preservation of the young mind, love and affection are nothing more than the most ordinary desires and separations in urban stories.

This is not only the dilemma of Dream of the Red Chamber, but the dilemma of almost all classical masterpieces. The context of the story is gradually lost, and the soul becomes mottled and blurred, imprisoned in the cumbersome barriers of ancient language and ethics. Therefore, conscientious adapters should release their souls again, place them in the contemporary context, and let them shine again.

The 1995 filmRichard III", transplanted the story background of the War of the Roses era to the 1930s, placed Richard III in the period of the rise of fascism, and retained Shakespeare's language. The mixture of the two produced an unexpected effect, expressing the original work's evil thoughts about human nature towards power more fluently and clearly.

The youth version of the Kunqu opera "The Peony Pavilion" directed by Pai Hsien-yung also grasped the word "love" from the original work, deleted nearly half of the plot, and strengthened the role of the "sheng" character, making it easier for contemporary people to understand and like the characters' personalities, and to better appreciate the deep and lasting love.

Many people are worried that the failure of this adaptation of Dream of the Red Chamber will bring difficulties to the establishment of subsequent adaptation projects. In fact, there is no need to worry. Whether it is adapted or not, Dream of the Red Chamber will not die. What will die is the hearts of young people who can no longer understand Dream of the Red Chamber.

Chen Mo

Editor: Chen Lingling