When the French writer Pierre Chaudelo Delacro's dangerous relationship was published in 1782, he probably would not have imagined that his novel, once banned for being "offensive to morality," would be beloved by Koreans three hundred years later, including the recently aired MBC Moonfire youth TV series "The Great Seducer," a story about seduction and depravity that had been filmed and televised by three Korean directors.
The first time was the movie "Scandal" directed by Lee Jae-yong and starring Bae Yong-joon, the second time was the film "Dangerous Relationship" of the same name directed by Heo Qinhao and starring Zhang Dongjian, and the most recent was the thirty-two episodes of the Korean TV series "The Great Seducer".
Koreans love this old French novel for a reason:
First of all, the drama of "Dangerous Relationship" is very strong, and the whole story revolves around the conspiracy and the relationship between men and women that occur in high society, with keywords including but not limited to sex, money, violence, and full of topic sense. All the plots unfold and expose with drama, the characters' emotions fluctuate wildly, and there are two of the most beloved types of female characters in Korean film and television in recent years—women who seek everything with all their hearts, who see emotional relationships and the flesh as tools and weapons, and who are traditionally uninhabited women of pure love.
Second, even if there are huge differences in culture between Eastern and Western societies, especially in Korea, a conservative society that still adheres to traditional Confucianism, and has little resemblance to eighteenth-century France, Koreans will not encounter any difficulties in adapting Dangerous Relations. The original work is composed of one hundred and seventy-five letters, and from the different perspectives of more than ten characters, together constitute the entire story, the setting of the characters and the psychology of the characters have been written, directly take it to dock with the local culture, and the times can be docked, and the difficulty of adaptation is low.
Third, the beginning of "Dangerous Relationship" is a revenge story, and revenge is one of the core propositions of Korean film and television dramas. South Koreans love to film their own history and don't seem to mind the dark moments in history, and the narrative of the film is a kind of revenge for the past, not to mention the countless revenge stories. What forms an intertextuality with the theme of revenge is the Korean model of bitterness and pleasure, which is a variant of revenge, and once the object of revenge is too abstract and broad, there is nothing to do, and you can only live with a bitter laugh.
Finally, stories like "Dangerous Relationships" that are extravagant and lascivious and steal jade and incense can only take place in the idle class. In South Korea, where everyone lives on coffee and rampages, there are only two types of people who have leisure, one is the elderly, and the other is the rich, the former has limited ability to realize desires, and the latter is the most appropriate story.
For viewers in front of the TV, watching rich people tormented by fate is a perfect outlet, and this kind of story that takes place in closed social circles is mostly very bloody. But as long as the dog's blood is not too ugly, the TV series can still be watched.
Wen Jiayan as Cui Xiuzhi
"The Great Seducer" transfers the story of the eighteenth-century high society stealing incense and jade to the second generation of Korean capitalists, the basic story structure and plot have not changed, but it has enriched the relationship between the characters, the relationship between the protagonists is dog blood, and the previous generation of the protagonists is also restless.
Male protagonist Kwon Shi Hyun (Yu Yu Huan) is the son of a large pharmaceutical company, the father because of his existence by the grandfather to obtain the right to inherit the group, but after the death of the male protagonist's mother, the father threw out a paternity test to say that the two are not related by blood, the rebellious male protagonist is sad and hopes to punish the father. To make matters worse, his father began to marry the attending physician before his mother's death in order to go public with a backdoor listing to consolidate his power.
The original attending physician is now the president of the hospital, and the director's daughter is the male protagonist's high school classmate and friend Choi So-chi (Played by Wen Jiaxuan). After Cui Xiuzhi's father went to prison, his relationship with his mother was tense, and after being dumped by the blind date arranged by his mother because of family problems, he could not swallow this breath and vowed revenge.
In order to prevent his father from getting married, the male protagonist proposes to Cui Xiuzhi. Cui Xiuzhi and the male protagonist agreed that if the male protagonist could destroy the sweetheart of her blind date, the female protagonist would fulfill her promise to marry him.
And this sweetheart is the daughter of the potter who the male protagonist's father really likes, that is, the heroine of the play, Yin Tae-hee (Park So-young).
Park so-young as Yin Tae-hee
Unlike Cecil, who had just come out of the monastery in the original novel, Yin Tae-hee was not an ignorant girl who did not know the world, her family was also broken, and her mother divorced her father without telling her, so Yin Tae-hee was seriously hurt and longed for independence. Unlike the second generation of chaebols, the incomplete family did not push Yin Tae-hee to embark on the path of depravity, but instead received a scholarship provided by the Choi So-chi family foundation as a three-good student.
In order to prevent his father from getting married, the male protagonist begins to seduce the female protagonist according to the agreement with the female number two... In the first two versions of Korean film and television, the male protagonist has not been able to get rid of the shackles of Confucian moral culture, play the heart game into the heart, can't help but fall in love with the heroine of pure love, in order to achieve their own goals and have to abandon the heroine, can the second generation of modern chaebols get rid of cultural shackles, break through taboos and boldly challenge the abyss of depravity? Viewers can wait and see.
After the change in the direction of Korean dramas in recent years, the dog blood story of the rich and noble people is no longer popular, and the life of the golden spoon lacks freshness for Korean audiences, and the life of the earth spoon is the object of the key performance. "The Great Seducer" was tepid after broadcasting, there was no splash, but there was still a reference significance for domestic dramas.
The reason why dog blood dramas are dog blood dramas is that the possibilities that can be produced in limited social networks are very limited, but even dog blood dramas are not good to watch. In the good-looking dog blood, the desire of the character plays the spider in the network, even if no prey hits the net, the spider will check the gaps and weave the web, and the bad dog blood drama completely relies on the shock caused by the hapless prey carelessly throwing into the spider web, relying on the event rather than the character's desire. In recent years, in the well-known dog blood Korean dramas, the rotten tail rate is directly proportional to the concentration of dog blood, the degree of drama is high, and the audience loves to watch - the audience can see the desire of the characters at the same time, they can also see their own desires, and they will also have the desire to continue watching.
"The Great Seducer" is a story driven by desire and succumbing to desire, it is itself a spider's web, and spiders may also be hurt by prey that tries to break free during the process of predation with the web, and the spider's web is a dangerous relationship for spiders. For three hundred years, the dangerous relationship has been endless, but I don't know if this relationship can achieve good results in the year of Penghu.