Beijing Daily Client | Reporter Qiu Wei
"Ligong - Old Events in the Northeast" starring Fan Wei, Yu Nan, Pan Binlong and others is being broadcast on Youku, and Fan Wei, who is good at shaping small characters, has come out again, and has partnered with a group of Northeast actors to create a suspense short drama with a unique temperament. The style of the play is mixed and matched, integrating different genres such as crime suspense, comedy, and strange tales, but there are too many clues in the work and the story advances slowly, which weakens the sense of suspense of the series to a certain extent.
The background of the story of "Ligong" is the small northeast city of Pisces River that takes place in 1990. From the production point of view, compared with the various period dramas shot on the screen in recent years, "Ligong" can be called a superb realistic restoration of the style of the 90s of the last century, and various life scenes with a sense of reality can evoke the memories of many middle-aged people who are gradually drifting away. The vast majority of Northeast actors in the play bring the original Northeast flavor to the work, forming a unique "Northeast suspense comedy" style.
At the beginning of the series, the villains Five Tiger Brothers are hired to find gold and come to the Pisces River, and these five people sneak across the border and commit murders along the way, causing panic among the people of the small town. In the face of the murderous Five Tigers, the positive role in the play is not the kind of high-minded, omnipotent police hero, but Quan Liang, an employee of the bottle warming factory security department played by Fan Wei. This little person who "chases dreams of sunset red" is not willing to be marginalized in life, and is bent on proving himself with meritorious service.
"Ligong" is a typical small character counterattack mode: an ordinary nameless person began to be ridiculed and despised, and later through struggle or accidents to the peak of life, he also realized the true meaning of life. The meticulous portrayal of Shang Quanliang in the play makes this core character very solid, and the character's love is more true, not in tune, keen on science fiction, and has a sense of justice was interpreted by Fan Wei to the core, especially the stubborn vigor in the instigation, which made the character full of joy. In the play, the criminal policeman Hu Ting, played by Pan Binlong, was once marginalized because of his temper and mistakes in handling cases. The tacit partnership of the two comedians in the play was called by the audience as a "mindless and unhappy" combination, which added a lot to the plot. Although the lady of the dumpling restaurant played by Yu Nan does not have many scenes, she still shows a rich sense of layering.
The series strung together the detective path of small people through various black and absurd bridges. Shang Quanliang in the play did not make a formal move, and with all kinds of bizarre yin and yang mistakes, three of the five tiger brothers were lame, four tigers fell stupid, and five tigers fell off the train and died. He also got inspiration from anecdotal magazine articles such as "Aliens Came to Earth to Mine Gold", and accidentally guessed the direction of the Five Tigers' action for the gold on the Old Demon Mountain. In terms of suspense, "Ligong" may be the peak at the beginning, and the nonsensical black humor in the play plays an anti-suspense role, which also greatly reduces the audience's expectations for the tension of the positive and negative confrontation drama.
With the development of the plot, the scattered clues in "Ligong" have been restricted, but they always revolve outside the main topic of the gold search story, replaced by the entanglement of the forces of the Pisces River, as well as the lives and emotions of many characters in the play. This situation may be because the "bottom" of the suspense plot line is relatively thin, or the work wants to present a period story full of northeast style in addition to suspense, but this will undoubtedly leave the impression of scattered focus on audiences who love the suspense genre.