"Moses on the Plain" is a novel that is difficult to adapt for film and television.
The difficulty stems first and foremost from its style and structure. The entire story is composed of first-person narration of multiple characters, and the timeline jumps. First-person, multi-perspective narration, and jumping timelines are all great challenges in cinematicization.
The first person can enter the heart of the character without any obstacles, creating intimacy between the reader and the character. Film and television need to find ways to externalize the characters' hearts, which is one more layer away than reading first-person narrations.
The multi-perspective and jumping timeline are like a challenge book for the director: Do you dare to adopt such an experimental form in film and television works?
The difficulty of adaptation also stems from the characteristics of the text. Although "Moses on the Plain" can be classified as a crime novel, it is also a pure literary work with a strong textual texture.
The author's Shuang Xuetao's writing reveals the cold and bleak of his northeastern hometown, and lights up a poetic light in the dark color of the times. It is both realistic and freehand, heavy and flowing.
Film and television can fully restore the plot and characters of the novel, and even create sublimation, but the text texture is always the most difficult to capture, because it is a unique characteristic of literature, and it is naturally incompatible with film and television expression techniques.
Double Xuetao
Faced with such a difficult adaptation, director Zhang Dalei gave a satisfactory answer.
He shot the episodic version of "Moses on the Plain" with the idea of creating an art film, creating an art-oriented drama that is not only unique in Chinese dramas, but also quite rare in foreign dramas.
It is like Bergman's Married Life, Fassbender's Berlin Alexanderplatz, and Kieslowski's Ten Commandments. Such series, which bear the strong imprint of film authorship, have been extinct for many years.
If you want to restore the intimacy and text texture of the first person in film and television, the most common technique is narration.
Scorsese and Woody Allen have combined narration with audiovisual language to make the unique characteristics of literary masterpieces jump on the screen. No matter how subtle the audiovisual language of the masters, narration seems to be an indispensable foundation, especially for novels with first-person narration.
However, Zhang Dalei abandoned narration and tried to restore the original work completely in audiovisual language and dramatic style. This approach is so bold that even film masters rarely challenge it. You know, this is a series, much larger than the movie.
However, Zhang Dalei succeeded.
Zhang Dalei
When presenting the first-person intimacy of a novel, many directors like to get as close to the characters as possible, using follow-up shots and close-ups to capture every detail change in the characters' expressions and movements.
Zhang Dalei did the opposite and pulled the camera away. "Moses on the Plain" is mostly panoramas, not many close-ups. Panoramas are dominated by long shots and include subtle and complex camera movements, scene scheduling, and depth of field changes. This audiovisual language creates ample space for the flow of the characters' emotions.
At the same time, the overall theatrical style is restrained and restrained. In highly life-like scenes, the actors' actions and lines avoid expressing their chests directly, and the deepest feelings in their hearts are faintly revealed in the details.
The open audiovisual language, restrained drama and performance, the two complement each other, so that the inner emotions of the characters flow in every space and every frame of shot.
This kind of "seeking the near and far" performance method highlights the richness of the character's heart and stimulates the audience's initiative. Different from watching ordinary dramas, audiences watching "Moses on the Plain" can taste more of the emotions in each scene and explore the soul of each character.
It's the same as reading a first-person novel. The experience of reading the text is of course more straightforward, but watching the episodes is also enough to get into the deepest recesses of the characters.
Without relying on narration and close-ups, Zhang Dalei successfully restored the essence of the first person with a technique that seems to deviate from the first person, which is an artistic breakthrough.
For the restoration of the text texture of the novel, Zhang Dalei relies on the combination of the whole and the details. The art styling design of the whole play successfully expresses the sense of hometown and the times.
Although Zhang Dalei changed the story space from the northeast to his hometown of Inner Mongolia, the two are actually highly similar: the same cold, rough, dilapidated, bleak, the same declining economy, the same lonely people.
Based on this environment, the design of the play is as close to life as possible, showing the survival of ordinary people from the mid-1990s to the 2000s. This is a presentation of the realistic part of the original text.
Realism is the strength of film and television, and the real difficulty lies in restoring the freehand characteristics of Shuangxuetao's text. Once again, the combination of audiovisual language and theatrical style comes into play.
In the moving long shots, the changing orientation of the characters and the focus of depth of field create an ethereal and flexible feeling, and the restrained and obscure theatrical style contains a deep and distant charm, and the combination of the two dyes the realistic scene with an unreal, mysterious and aesthetic color.
The two lake rafting scenes at the beginning and end are the best examples. The characters sit on a fluttering boat, and in the changeable shots, they unconsciously complete the fate change and reincarnation across the ages, which is both real and untouchable.
Zhang Dalei also pays attention to using empty shots to create an atmosphere. The final shots of the first and fourth episodes are both burning fires in the night, the former is the destruction of the corpse after the crime, and the latter is the externalization of the loneliness character's heart. These fires are like the shimmering light of the cold night in the northeast written by Shuang Xuetao, which is both cruel and beautiful.
Some of the transitions also present both the real environment and the freehand atmosphere.
For example, in episodes 5 and 6, the police escort the suspect wide-shot, and the small police convoy walking on the winding mountain road. The desolation of the times and the impermanence of personal destiny are all shown in this bleak and magnificent lens.
The play also uses music and songs to express lyrical characteristics.
Although this technique is a little old-fashioned, the songs and music appear closely integrated with the lives of the characters, not deliberately, but capturing the brightness hidden in the bleak daily life.
The lyricism and poetry in the lives of ordinary people are the core characteristics of Shuang Xuetao's novels.
Presenting surreal ethereal in high realism, lighting up the beautiful lyrical flame in the cold gray darkness of the northeast, fusing and unifying the seemingly repulsive poles, and creating a strong impact through strong contrast.
This highly literary style was successfully translated into film and television language by Zhang Dalei without loss, which is a rare artistic achievement in domestic and foreign dramas.
Compared with the restoration of literary style and text texture, the series has a slight regret in the adaptation of the original story. As mentioned above, the novel's multi-character perspective narrative and jumping timeline are like a challenge book for the director, but Zhang Dalei did not dare to take it.
And rightly so. Episodes necessarily have to consider ratings. Artistic audiovisual and theatrical styles have slowed down the pace considerably, and if multi-perspective non-linear narratives are adopted, I am afraid that the vast majority of audiences will be shut out. Zhang Dalei still changed the story to a more conventional omniscient perspective linear narrative, lowering the viewing threshold.
Although he still captures the two main themes of the original work - era and character fate in character portrayal and theme expression, the linear omniscient narrative structure still weakens the strong sense of fatalism in the original work, which is the core of the story.
The most prominent is the story line of Zhuang Shu and Xiaofei. As the most important group of characters in the original book, they have had a key impact on each other's life trajectories across the ages, and they also string together all the time, place and characters. This is a web-like story, and Zhuang Shu and Xiaofei are the center points of the net. The narrative of the original book diverges from this center and returns to the center, resembling a circular structure of reincarnation.
In the play, Zhuang Shu still occupies the central position, but Xiaofei is slightly weakened, and even becomes a slightly symbolic character in adulthood. Instead, more lengthy portrayals of other characters. This depiction of multiple characters with average ink fits the series, but deviates from the circular structure of the novel. Zhuang Shu and Xiaofei's influence on each other's fate is still there, but it is less prominent than the original.
In the linear narrative structure, they, like other characters, are only one link, not the central point. Although more characters have been more fully shaped, the core function of Zhuang Shu and Xiaofei's narrative is lost, and the circular structure is disintegrated, which still weakens the sense of fatalism of the entire story.
Perhaps aware of this shortcoming, Zhang Dalei designed an ending that clearly corresponds to the beginning. The final reunion of adult Zhuangshu and Xiaofei on the lake echoes the rowing scene of Zhang Dezeng and Fu Dongxin's first meeting on the lake at the beginning. This appears to form a circular structure on the surface.
The drama on the lake at the end is good enough in audio-visual, drama and performance, and has the power to strike people's hearts, but its essence is still based on the total explosive ending of the flat and direct narrative structure, not the circular structure of the original, and the episode is slightly overworked compared with the end of the novel, but less desolate aftertaste of fate.
The beginning and end correspond to the lake rafting scene
The broadcast in China of such an author-type drama, which is rare in the world, will inevitably cause controversy. Ordinary viewers who are accustomed to regular episodes feel that the pace of the show is slow, and the plot and character performance are too vague.
Although film and television lovers with more viewing experience are more comfortable with this style, there are also critical voices that accuse the director of being too self-righteous, with the coat of art films, but in fact hollow inside. In fact, looking closely at the plot structure of this play, Zhang Dalei is not blindly pursuing the author's directing style, but is trying to create a work that is artistically and commercially attractive.
"Moses on the Plain" has been labeled as a crime novel, but it is not a crime novel in essence. Shuang Xuetao clearly said that the case is not the most important thing, he uses the case as an interspersed lead, connecting multiple ordinary people and telling a panoramic story with a large time span.
Although the cases in the original work play a key role in the plot, they do not have the shadow of crime genre novels at all in terms of writing. In comparison, although the cases in the series are not the most core elements, they account for a significantly heavier proportion than the novel, and each episode will have the development of the case, and often leave suspense at the end, attracting people to continue watching.
Therefore, the series is more like a social crime story than a novel. This is Zhang Dalei's effort to balance art and commerce. From the final effect, the suspense of the case has also reached a balance and unity with the characterization and directorial style.
Many independent film directors in China do often commit formalism. They are obsessed with realism, vernacular, long shots, scene scheduling, and vague expression, resulting in slow rhythm, unclear meaning, but lack of substantial content support. Zhang Dalei's debut novel "August" has this flaw.
In Moses on the Plain, Zhang Dalei takes the issue of formalism into perspective. This play has all the typical formal characteristics of Chinese art films, and at first glance it seems to be a pseudo-art work where form is greater than content, but in fact, the content of each scene is rich enough and matches the form, even if it is slow, it is not empty.
While maintaining the author's style, Zhang Dalei has significantly improved the efficiency of storytelling. This is a transcendence of himself, but also a transcendence of Chinese independent cinema as a whole.
Therefore, it seems to me that most of the controversial criticism of Moses on the Plain is actually slightly biased. It is unfair to demand this drama with the plot density and rhythm compactness of a purely commercial drama.
This is not a purely commercial drama. Its primary goal is to restore the literary style of the novel in audiovisual language and make artistic expression.
This makes each scene necessarily longer and slower than purely plot-driven episodes. Labeling this play as more form than content with the stereotype of Chinese independent films ignores Zhang Dalei's efforts in narrative efficiency and the combination of form and content.
For such a sincere work of high artistic standard and attractive story, we might as well sit down and savor it.