Recently, the TV series "Journey without Confusion" starring Chen Jianbin, Mei Ting, Tu Songyan and others is about to end on Zhejiang Satellite TV. The play tells the story of book publisher Malevin and the female teacher of "North Drift", who after experiencing the emotional twists and turns of middle age and the realistic blow to the ideal, still choose to follow their hearts and smile to face the confusion of life.
After the show was broadcast, there were audience comments, whether it was the character setting or the plot direction, it had the flavor of "Jane Eyre". However, the director of the play, Han Jie, said in an exclusive interview with a reporter from the Beijing News that "The Journey of No Confusion" prefers to tell the story of "I resist, so I exist" (Camus). Each of these characters is based on middle-aged people who are really facing the confusion of life in his life. "All the positive meaning of this play is to say that the confusion of life is endless, even if the resistance is futile, it should be resisted, not necessarily in vain. This is the courage or temperament that we believe contemporary people should have. ”
Book publisher Malevin with "North Drift" female teacher Simple.
Talk about the plot
Each image of the "League of Rebels" is based on life
In Han Jie's view, the key word in the creation of "Journey without Confusion" is "resistance" - whether it is 20, 30 or 40 years old, everyone will encounter some spiritual crises and difficulties in life. But often many people lose the ability to act and resist, and lose the courage to change reality. Middle-aged people are especially serious, they face the pressure of life at the top and the bottom, and there are many fears and shrinking concerns in the cruel reality.
First and foremost is the male protagonist of the play, Malevin. In Han Jie's view, he is a "rebel theorist", gushing, full of experience, talent, always able to point out the direction of other people's lives. But in middle age, in the face of the weakening of the book industry he loves most, and in the face of his ex-wife who suffers from bipolar disorder, he wants to seek a solution to the problem, but he always stays where he is and does not take any action.
On the contrary, the heroine is simply a "practitioner of resistance" with strong action ability. Although she was born in the countryside, when she gave up her stable job to come to the big city to find that her fiancé was cheating and encountered oppression by the magnates in the aristocratic school, she resolutely chose to follow her heart, decisively broke up with her fiancé despite her family's opposition, and dealt with the problem of students from different families in the school impartially and selflessly.
"Simplicity is a stimulus for Malevin, a change, a touch. The tangible and perceptible dilemma they brought about touched me very much, and it was shaped by combining my friends around me, my friends' friends, and many of these things. Han Jie said.
The story of the play combines the experiences of many of the director's friends.
With the development of the plot, some viewers said that "Journey without Confusion" seems to be a little slow to unfold the emotional line of the male and female protagonists, and uses a lot of space to tell the story of simple ex-fiancé Feng Chunsheng and his wife, simple brother Jian Xingyan and girlfriend Qiao Qingqian, and the other two relationship lines. In Han Jie's view, "Journey of No Confusion" is a group portrait drama, and at the beginning of the creation, he had a joke with the screenwriting team, and this play may be the "rebel alliance" of contemporary people - people from different social backgrounds are faced with completely different choices about resistance. For example, Feng Chunsheng, who came from the countryside and has a doctorate degree in the play, in Han Jie's view, he is not a face-facing "phoenix man" or "cheating man", he chose the latter in order to change his fate, in the simple and rich woman Zhuo Xiaoting. In the face of the identity and pressure of the "son-in-law of the chairman" in his work, he still tries every means to seek a more equal opportunity to compete. "Such people actually exist." Zhuo Xiaoting is from top to bottom, for love, she has to rebel against the wealth class, rebel against her father, and insist on marrying Feng Chunsheng.
But Han Jie does not want to express whether it is right or wrong to resist, just like the plot comes to an end, and everyone in the play still has difficulties after choosing to resist, and also bears the corresponding consequences of resistance. For example, Feng Chunsheng is always saddled with moral infamy in his family and outside public opinion.
Han Jie very much liked a line in Sartre's "Confinement" quoted by Malevin in the play: People live in the eyes of others, people cannot recognize themselves, and they must rely on the evaluation of others to know themselves..." Sisyphus pushed the stone up the mountain and fell down, pushed it up and down again. The whole point of this is that after it falls, Sisyphus has to push it up again. "The Journey of Not Confused" wants to convey a kind of expectation, as long as you act and bear the consequences of your choices, you can naturally find its value and meaning. ”
Talk about roles
Chen Jianbin loves books as much as Malevin
Chen Jianbin is an artist admired by Han Jie. Han Jie once introduced to him that the Malevin in "The Journey of No Confusion" is a bit like Chekhov's "Cherry Orchard" in Liubaofu Ranevskaya - under the change of times, the cherry orchard that Liu Baofu still guarded for various reasons was finally cut down by Robasin. The sound of cherry cutting at the end of "Cherry Orchard" is actually destroying Willow's old spiritual home. "The old spiritual home can have many layers of meaning, and one of them must be beautiful, just like Malevin's attachment to the physical bookstore in the play."
The addition of Chen Jianbin made the director firm in his determination to shoot "The Journey of No Confusion".
At the same time, Malevin is universal. Han Jie graduated from the Directing Department of the Shanghai Theater Academy and is now a director at the National Theatre of China. In the past few years, he has seen many people around him who are struggling to continue to run a theater; he and many friends have also lamented that the times have changed too fast, and the spiritual homes that have touched their hearts in the past, such as theaters and bookstores, are gradually moving away, and there is no time for people to cling to them. But few people will fight and act on this. Han Jie once knew a teacher who made him admire, and he said that he wanted to write a book all his life, but until his death, he did not fulfill this wish. Like the Soviet playwright Vanbilov's play "Fight the Wild Duck", one of the characters, called Zilov, always shouted to fight the wild duck, but the gun was always hung there, and in the end it was not done.
The Malevin in "The Journey of Confusion" is like a dramatic expression of the hearts of these people. In Han Jie's view, Malevin is a character with Don Quixote temperament - daring to challenge the changing times and stubbornly insisting on leaving a physical bookstore. "I admire him very much. I think this society needs Male-Leninist figures. ”
This role also deeply touched Chen Jianbin. Han Jie frankly said that it was Chen Jianbin's joining that made him firmly determined to shoot "The Journey of No Confusion", "Teacher Chen is an intellectual actor in my eyes, he relies on understanding to act, and his creativity makes me admire, so when Malevin's role was first created, I first thought of Teacher Chen to act, it was he who gave me the courage to create this script and persevere, it should be said that if there is no Teacher Chen, I may not want to make this play ' dead beggar'. ”
Beijing News reporter Zhang He
Edited by Tong Na Proofreader Li Lijun