Beijing Daily Client | Reporter Li Xiazhi
The online drama "Moses on the Plain", adapted from Shuang Xuetao's novel of the same name, has ended on iQiyi, only 6 episodes in length, each episode is more than an hour, this time the Mist Theater conducted a miniseries experiment.
A memoir of youth full of age
Starring Dong Zijian and Haiqing, the play tells the story of police Zhuang Shu (played by Dong Zijian) who traces the truth of the old case 7 years ago, and gradually discovers that the father and daughter of the Li family, who were involved with him when they were teenagers, became suspects, and the constantly emerging clues made the case begin to see the clouds. The original book itself has attracted much attention because it was adapted from the movie, and this time adapted into a drama version, iQiyi did not continue the conventional length of 12 episodes of the Misty Theater, but changed it to a 6-episode miniseries, and enabled the director of the movie "August" Zhang Dalei to shoot.
This way of establishing a project almost points to the possibility of experimentation, and after the premiere of the series, it also presents a completely different suspense online drama. Taking the first episode as an example, the whole show does not have a very obvious narrative conflict, uses a lot of long shots, and uses few lines while being slow-paced. Because the play belongs to the Misty Theater of iQiyi's suspense online drama, many viewers who have not seen the original work speculate at the beginning of the various speculations about whether the characters will have accidents and which character is the murderer. But this conventional viewing experience has all failed on this online drama, and the plot of the first few episodes is just to explain the growth environment of Zhuangshu in childhood, although there are also follow-up homicides that are related, but they are not too buried.
The slow narrative rhythm continues until the end of the whole play, even if the plot itself is based on a murder case to unfold the narrative, but the play does not use standard suspense drama expression to promote the plot, more to shape the atmosphere with images, weakening the plot promotion at the level of solving the case, and paying more attention to the interaction between people and the times, more like a youth memoir full of age. This image style can indeed be traced back to director Zhang Dalei's "August", Zhang Dalei, who is well known to the audience with his debut, and the style of the work is similar calm and restrained, with a nostalgic retro vision. He once said in an interview that he loves Taiwan's New Wave films, and likes a more life-like way of acting, preferring a visual style that does not show traces. This filming style also continues to "Moses on the Plain", the story uses a lot of space to show the daily life of the northwest town in the eighties and nineties of the last century, from the marriage of the father's generation to the working status of the state-owned factory, through the growth of Zhuangshu to recall the past era, looking back at childhood and youth.
The slow-paced new suspense drama tests the audience's patience
In the view of the original author Shuang Xuetao, the drama version is actually a new creation of director Zhang Dalei, "Although it is adapted from a novel, the director has built a whole new world, he is not only an illustrated novel, but a world with feelings and righteousness." In Shuang Xuetao's view, Zhang Dalei's experiments are extremely adventurous, and a large number of long shots are used for content services, in order to present the relationship between people that the play hopes to tell.
iQiyi believes that the film is not a typical suspense drama, more of a growth story, "It creates a rich group of characters behind it, hoping to express that in the process of growth, everyone has fire, and it is very difficult to seek understanding during the growth process." iQiyi chose to do such a small-scale miniseries at the beginning of the project, although the number is relatively rare in Chinese dramas, but for the expression and content presentation of the film, "I hope to explore a new possibility of communication with the audience, the current pace of life is so fast, we hope to play games with time." ”
However, the relatively slow pace of watching the drama, without a particularly strong plot narrative promotion, does challenge the audience's cleaning habits. When the audience generally opens this play with the expectation of the Misty Theater, they are more or less expecting to see the "spectacle" of a new suspense drama. For impatient audiences, not enough suspense may become the biggest "original sin" of the show, and many viewers can't wait for a sufficient concentration of the plot, so they bluntly say "it's sleepy".
Judging from the closing evaluation of the play on Douban, the drama has a closing score of 7.7 points on Douban, and more than forty percent of the audience gave a four-star evaluation, which is quite excellent compared to most domestic dramas in the past two years. If you abandon the suspenseful nature of the drama and look at this new drama from the perspective of a literary film, you may be able to see the transformation of the film to express the transformation of domestic online dramas. From this point of view, "Moses on the Plain" makes a bold attempt, providing new possibilities in the way of image expression and presentation. A few days ago, "Moses on the Plain" was shortlisted for the drama unit at the 73rd Berlin International Film Festival, becoming the first Chinese-language work shortlisted in the nine years since the establishment of the unit, and the only Chinese-language work selected this year. Perhaps, from the perspective of literary films, "Moses on the Plain" is a masterpiece, but when it is titled the Theater of the Mist, there will be an expected gap.