Text|Cooked apples
Since its premiere on the Central 8th prime-time premiere on February 17, the period emotional drama "Love Full of Nine Bends" has been at the forefront of primetime TV series single channel ratings, and has now ended. The play tells the growth story of Yang Shumao, Ye Fei, Shi Xiaona, Zhao Yajing and others who grew up in the Jiudao Bend of the old Beijing hutong, accompanied by the forty years of reform and opening up.
The director of the play, Liu Jiacheng, is one of the representative figures of "Beijing Opera of Beijing", in addition to "Love Man Nine Bends", the works directly named after Beijing place names or Beijing characteristic buildings include "Under the Gate of Zhengyang", "Love Man Courtyard", "Sesame Hutong" and so on, and the "Love Man Bell and Drum Tower" and "Love Man Gui Street" that are planned to be prepared in the future are also among them, which are quite rich.
And whether these stories take place in the drum tower, the street or the courtyard, they cannot bypass the same place - the hutong.
As a hub, hutongs are indispensable for communicating local traffic; As a residential area, the courtyards on both sides of the hutong are the living quarters of ordinary citizens in the middle of the noise; As a cultural symbol, the architectural form and cultural landscape represented by hutongs are one of the most prominent features of Beijing-style elements.
It can be said that without "hutongs", "Peking opera" will lose its color and be dull.
Of course, domestic film and television dramas have been developing for decades, and Liu Jiacheng is not only fond of "hutong culture". From the beginning when "Four Generations Together" was adapted into a TV series, "hutong culture" has been active on the screen. Later, works such as "Jinghua Smoke" and "The Gate of the Mansion" also entered the film and television education courses of colleges and universities as model scriptures, and were regarded as guidelines by students.
In recent years, TV dramas using hutongs as storyboards have emerged one after another, many of which are big productions, and they also have the blessings of old drama bones and traffic stars. For example, "Shichahai" in 2020, "Hutong" in 2022, "Nine Bends of Love" in 2023 and "The Sea in the Dream" to be broadcast, etc., it can be said that "hutong culture" has never been far from the audience's field of vision.
Why Alley?
The word "hutong" was first found in Zhuyuan Zaqu, referring to the relatively small streets between the main streets in northern towns or villages, and in Guan Hanqing's "Single Dao Club", there is a phrase "kill a bloody alley".
The direction of the hutongs is mostly due east and west, or intertwined north and south, connecting various streets, markets and residential areas between the cities from shallow to deep. Most of the buildings on both sides are courtyards, official residences and civic halls.
Such an architectural form also directly determines that the human exchanges, intricate social relations, and rich and profound city atmosphere belonging to the hutong are destined to become one of the important sources of many literary and artistic works, and the first full-length TV series "Four Generations in the Same House" in New China was born here.
The play is adapted from Lao She's classic novel of the same name, which caused thousands of people to empty alleys after it was broadcast in 1985, and is an unforgettable screen memory for a generation. A small sheepfold hutong in Beijing in the story connects the ups and downs of the fate of four generations, reflecting the vicissitudes of Chinese society under the turbulence of the times. At the same time, it also means that hutongs, as a cultural form, have been pushed to a broader audience market by the mass communication tools of TV dramas.
Since then, TV series with hutongs as the background of stories have sprung up one after another, and even directly named with the name of the hutong, such as "Xiaojing Alley", "Xizhao Street", "Qianmen Louzi Jiuzhang Nine", "Under the Zhengyang Gate", "Stories in Happiness", "Sesame Alley", "Shichahai", "Nine Bends of Love" and so on. All of them reflect the prosperity of hutong culture.
"One side of the water and soil does not raise the other person"
Such a hutong culture, which is favored by film and television creators, has also been quite active on the screen in recent years. From 2019 to the present, the average output of 1~2 TV series per year has been maintained. From the perspective of production magnitude, actor cast and emphasis on hutong culture, the four works of "Sesame Alley" in 2019, "Shichahai" in 2020, "Hutong" in 2022, and "Nine Bends of Love" in 2023 are the most prominent, and can be discussed together.
From the perspective of the time of the story, the background of the times selected by these works almost covers China's important nodes from the Liberation War - the founding of New China - reform and opening up - to modernization, and the narrative perspectives are also different, respectively around store management, family trivia, women's growth, youth struggle and other keywords, the sample size is quite rich.
From the casting level, in addition to "Sesame Alley", the other three of these four works have traffic stars involved. For example, Wu Lei and Guan Xiaotong in "Shichahai", Zhao Lusi and Hou Minghao in "Hutong", and Han Dongjun and Chen Yao in "Nine Bends of Love", all of which have increased the relevant popularity of the series to varying degrees. At the same time, they have also gathered a group of "national team" actors to compete on the same stage, and there are countless veteran actors.
It stands to reason that these dramas belong to the configuration of big dramas from magnitude to casting, and their performance is also remarkable, but so far no phenomenal explosion has been born from them, and word of mouth even has a trend of high opening and low going. And although the story revolves around the hutong, the audience's discussion of the "alley" in the play is not as high as the "light character film alley" in last year's "The World".
Why is this the case?
Generally speaking, the factors that affect the reputation of a TV series are nothing more than whether the rhythm is dragged on, whether the plot has loopholes, whether the acting skills are online, and whether the story is full. Even with the advancement of the film and television industry, audiences began to carefully examine other aspects such as art sets, filter effects, etc., and comprehensively scored them. Opening the comment area and barrage of these four dramas, you can find that they all have the above-mentioned types of problems, which are basically clichés in the comments.
But since these four works are all around the "hutong" to narrate and name, in the end, we have to return to the common theme of "hutong" to talk about it, to see if the main creator has made the most of the "hutong" and whether there are parts that can be improved.
Before being an element in film and television dramas, hutongs were first and foremost a product of history. Especially after hundreds of years of great changes, it is not only a symbol of local life, but also contains the common emotions of the whole nation.
This means that the character relationship around the hutong needs to meet the spontaneous expectations of the Chinese people for "Chinese aesthetics" and "Chinese emotions", otherwise it will produce a sense of suspension, making the characters and dialogues in the play seem to travel from other time and space. And these four dramas all belong to realism rather than an overhead world view, and if the sense of suspension is serious, it will inevitably lead to a split in the perception. For example, Zhao Lusi's "Korean performance method" in "Alley", Hou Minghao's three-seven distribution type, such scenes gathered together, will affect the texture of the drama to some extent.
In addition to landmarks, dialects are also one of the biggest features of regional culture, but in many Peking dramas, dialects have disappeared. It is obviously a story that takes place in a Beijing hutong, and it is somewhat unconvincing if the protagonists do not know the Beijing dialect at all. If you want to rely on a few Beijing-style snacks and empty mirrors with white walls and mud tiles interspersed in the film to reflect the hutong culture, I am afraid that it will have a limited effect.
Regarding this issue, it is reflected in "Hutong", "Love Man Nine Road Bends", "Sesame Hutong" and even more Peking dramas. "Shichahai" did relatively well, of course, this is also due to casting. Although the starring Liu Peiqi is not an old Beijinger, he has also lived in Beijing for many years, and he speaks in a Beijing dialect with a sloppy voice, showing the "dry, fierce, and poor" of the old guns in the hutongs to the fullest, and even the American David who appears in the play has to say a few authentic old Beijing slang words from time to time. What's more, the main scenes of the play are mainly live-action shooting, and many dialect dialogues can be included from the ambient sound.
If you want to learn from the excellent model of regional dramas in this regard, "Country Love" and "Liu Laogen", which have been producing sequels in the past two years, are very typical, and they are successful cases of perfect combination of dialect and story. The regional characteristics and the unique humor of Northeasterners are revealed in the laughter and scolding full of dialects, which directly narrows the distance between the audience in Northeast China and other provinces, and finally achieves two classic IPs, with other derivative works by the way.
In addition, in addition to being a cultural symbol, hutongs are mainly used as an architectural form for people to live in. From an architectural point of view, everything that happens is "a matter of people and living space". People build homes, and homes influence people. So much so that the form of the building itself carries with it a certain dramatic conflict.
The hutong is square and straight, horizontal and vertical, and the courtyards on both sides are symmetrically arranged on the north and south vertical axes and closed independent courtyards as the basic features. While highlighting traditional Chinese Confucian culture, it also reveals restraint and conservatism.
The famous writer Mr. Wang Zengqi once described hutong culture as a closed culture: "Most of the houses in the hutongs are old, and the 'Digener' houses are not very good, the old purlins and broken brick walls." On rainy days, it is often heavy outside and small inside the house. When it rains heavily, you can always hear the sound of houses collapsing, which are houses in the alley. But they are reluctant to 'move the nest' - 'breaking the family is worth everything'. ”
This is presented in a similar scene in the TV series "Shichahai", such as the third dealer played by Lian Yiming who was blocked in reversing in the alley, and was ridiculed by the rickshaw driver on the side of the road: the car is too big and the hutong is too small. The third man shot back: "It is a feeling to open the tiger's head." ”
Although such scenes show the characteristics of hutong culture, they have also caused many young people to complain on the Internet, feeling that similar bridges are "too pretty" and "how to take the tune" and so on. The essence is a collision of old and new cultures, which has nothing to do with right or wrong, but it may affect the rating of the series on Internet platforms dominated by young people.
In general, in addition to "Shichahai", these four works are somewhat detached from the "hutong culture" to tell the story of the hutong, and belong to the same "one side of the water and soil does not raise one person", but the plot is light or heavy. Although "Shichahai" emphasizes regional characteristics, there is also a lot of room for improvement compared to regional drama works of the same period. Secondly, regional dramas also need to build a balanced bridge between "inheritance" and "old-fashionedness" to arouse the interest of more young audiences.
epilogue
For film and television creators, the humanistic resources contained in China's vast land and vast territory are the best creative soil. Between different cities and provinces and under different ethnic customs, local cultural characteristics are distinct.
For example, "White Deer Plain", which reflects the culture of northern Shaanxi, integrates the "characteristics of Guanzhong Province" with character shaping quite well, in the play, Zhang Jiayi's Bai Jiaxuan and He Bing's Lu Zilin, eating has never been able to squat, and this set comes from the first of the "eight monsters" of Shaanxi culture - "sit up without a stool". For example, "Crossing the Guandong", which embodies Qilu culture, also vividly interprets the traditional concepts such as "loyalty, righteousness, etiquette, filial piety" that Shandong people believe in in their bones. Not to mention the "Country Love" series that has long played Northeast characteristics.
The reason why these works can stand out from the crowd of regional dramas is that they have not achieved a deep understanding of regional culture.
There has always been a Chinese folk saying: "A good chef has a handful of salt", which means that salt is the root of all tastes, and when salt is used in place, ordinary people can become chefs. This passage also appeared as the protagonist's line in the TV series "Shichahai".
For film and television dramas that unfold narratives around hutongs, the culture behind hutongs may be that handful of salt. It takes film and television creators to weigh carefully and taste it carefully to make it taste. The same is true for other regional dramas.