Text | Flowers without feast
Since "Parasite" and "Squid Game" have led the awards and the market respectively, the global expansion of Korean film and television works has become faster and faster.
Recently, there is a new drama "Pinball Game" funded by Apple TV and produced by Korean entertainers, which has won a super high reputation, with a rating of 8.4 on the IMDb website, and the freshness of Rotten Tomatoes is as high as 98%.
But unlike Netflix's Squid Game, Pinball Game, which also has a "game" suffix in the title, is not a cool drama, but an epic story of a family in a span of eighty years. How does such a slow and rational family ethics drama win the favor of the audience?
01
The story of "Pinball Game" is not original, but is adapted from the novel "Bai Qingge" by Korean writer Lee Min Kim. As soon as the book was launched in 2017, it was well received by major book review websites and newspapers and magazines in Europe and the United States, and was rated as one of the top ten books of the year by the New York Times and The Times, and the book also became the first best-seller list on Amazon shopping websites in many countries.
The so-called "Kashiwa Tsingo" is a game console that originated in the European billiard machine and was officially born in the Nagoya area of Japan in 1930. In Japan, this slot-like game console is very popular with the public. According to statistics, in the most popular 1995, the total output value of the game console industry was nearly 40 trillion yen, and more than 90% of the operators of Bai Qingge were Koreans.
The play uses this as the title, not to tell the story of Bai Qingge, but to reflect the ups and downs of that generation through this industry that is closely related to the Koreans in Japan.
The story of the original novel is a linear narrative that begins with the Japanese colonization of the Korean Peninsula in the 1910s and revolves around Shanci, an ill-fated woman and her family, and continues until the collapse of the Japanese economy in the late 1980s. During this period, the four generations of the Shanci family circulated in three countries and staged a touching epic of survival.
Therefore, some Douban netizens compared it to the Korean version of "The World of Man".
However, the drama version, while maintaining the general content of the story, boldly adopts a two-line narrative. One begins in 1915 and follows the course of Shanci's birth and growth; the other focuses on Shanci and her grandson Solomon in 1989.
In 1915, Kindness was born in the home of a poor couple. Before marrying her father, my mother struggled to survive and begged; although my father owned a boarding house (providing simple accommodation for the bottom fishermen), he suffered discrimination from those around him because of his cleft lip.
Before Shan Ci was born, her mother had given birth to three children, but all of them died tragically. Kindness to grow up safely is the couple's only wish.
Therefore, although the Shanci family was not rich, the young Shanci was greatly favored by her father, and she was also praised by her neighbors for her cleverness and cleverness.
But unfortunate things still befell this girl. Before he became an adult, Shan Ci's father died of illness, and when Shan Ci became an adult, he was deceived by a scumbag, Gao Han Shui (played by Lee Min Ho).
In order not to disgrace her mother, Shanci took the child in her belly and drifted out alone, heading to Japan to find a way to live.
In the 1989 storyline, the life of kindness in the twilight years is still complete.
The family settled in Osaka, Japan for many years, the son opened a Shop of Bo Qingge, the income is not cheap, grandson Solomon studied in the United States, became an executive of a multinational company, young and promising.
However, Solomon suddenly returned to Tokyo with Sun-ci to mediate his business and conduct public relations with an old Korean-American woman in an attempt to acquire the land of the latter's old house for a billion yen, thus completing the construction of a large hotel.
This incident broke shanci's peaceful life for many years, and made her feel nostalgic in her heart, planning to set foot on her homeland again.
The series constantly switches between these two story lines, through parallel montages and various interesting editing techniques, allowing us to taste suffering and chew on life at different stages of Shanci's life.
Due to the sheer story of the original novel and the large time span, the eight collectives of the first season of this season naturally cannot be fully included, let alone other heavy characters that have not yet appeared. Therefore, it is reported that this drama will be filmed for a total of four seasons, just like Netflix's "The Crown", completing an epic narrative of a woman.
02
In Pinball Games, there are two seemingly opposite, but quietly intertwined forces that have been entangled in them. One is the chaotic sense of individual life and identity confusion in turbulent times, and the other is the cohesion of mutual support and mutual fulfillment in family ethics.
The chaotic psychology of the characters stems from the frequent wars and chaos in the big era.
After 1910, Japan officially colonized the Korean Peninsula, and the resulting survival oppression and mental repression became the initiator of the suffering fate of the characters in the play.
Rice, which was hard to grow, became the mouth of the Japanese rulers; even the white clothes of their own people could not be worn by women, otherwise they would be thrown into the mud by Japanese children; or, if the people had the slightest anti-Japanese rhetoric and expressed their dissatisfaction, they would be arrested by the police and beaten in the street to make an example.
The kindness that grew up in this chilling environment could not have the slightest affection for the Japanese, but she also could not directly express her anger. As she said as a child: I don't want to kill japanese people, [because] I don't want to leave my parents.
And when Shanci became an adult, she learned from the mercurial Gaohan mouth that the modern convenience of Japanese cities was red and green, and she had a longing feeling. If Gao Hanshui had promised to marry her and bring her to Japan to settle down, I believe that Shanci would definitely not refuse.
This psychological confusion continued from kindness to her grandson Solomon. As a South Korean born and raised in Japan, studying and working in the United States, Solomon could not stand the discrimination and insults against him by Americans and Japanese, but at the same time he could only present himself as a "world man" and talk about the meaninglessness of national borders themselves.
When an individual is constantly squeezed between living space and national dignity, he/she cannot be clear and calm. This is a paradox about the realm of reality and the realm of spirit.
Just like the most interesting transition in the play: when Solomon and his American colleagues listen to the news of Emperor Showa's death without a word, the camera gradually travels through time and space to the moment when his benevolent father dies, who is vomiting blood and dying tragically.
This montage effect has too many complex meanings. One is the head of state who has brought deep disaster to the Korean Peninsula, the other is a father who is extremely important to kindness; one is a Japanese Korean who is not shocked at heart, and the other is a Japanese South Korean whose emotions are greatly affected.
However, this chaotic psychology was corrected and resolved because of the family warmth of the Shanci family, which had never disappeared.
A kind father, though fond of his daughter, is not unbridled. When he saw the poor fishermen giving Mercy change, he did not stop it. It's not that he covets this little money, but in his opinion, his daughter should know that there is goodwill in the world, especially in the environment where malice is full of growth.
Similarly, when a kind mother sees a seriously ill Christian, she does not hesitate to take care of him instead of reporting it to the police for credit.
These human touches of the Benevolent Family are rare and testing stones of the chaotic times, and they do not choose to treat others with evil because of suffering, but maintain the kindness and generosity of the people at the bottom to resist this black oppressive world.
In fact, the discussion of multiculturalism and the debate of ethnic identity in "Pinball Game" are not uncommon in the works of Korean directors in recent years.
In 2020, Lee Ezaar Cheng's "Minari" tells the story of a Korean family that immigrated to Arkansas in the 1980s and tried to make a fortune by growing vegetables. During this period, conflicts between korean-born family members and the warming of groups when disasters strike, metaphorically illustrate the complex relationship between Asians and Western cultures.
Similarly, Guo Gongda, one of the directors of "Pinball Game", also expressed his confusion about family and multiple identities in a different way in his first two films.
"In Columbus", through the encounter of a strange man and woman, uses the mirror relationship to create the "aphasia" syndrome between the two generations, and re-examines the problem of the original family through an external perspective.
The science fiction film "After Young", which has just released resources, lets black mothers, white fathers, adopted Asian girls and robo brothers form a family. When a seemingly emotionless robot is damaged, how can the family's family bond be maintained?
Family ethics under multiculturalism has become a common concern for these Korean directors who grew up in the United States. From this perspective, it is no accident that "Pinball Game" can be favored by Apple TV and invest more than $10 million in production costs per episode. This is actually an effective weapon for Korean filmmakers to open up the emotional barrier of Western audiences.
For this series, a large number of exquisite and accurate empty shot pictures, and the full and ups and downs of emotional relationships between the characters, have made it a rare boutique in the field of recent dramas. As for whether the second half of the play can still maintain the standard, it depends on whether it can play a new idea in the two-line narrative method.