"After Marriage" is a novel secretly written by university lecturer Pan Shanren (played by Luo Ziyi).
The novel is half-true, but it is a true record of his own experience after the derailment.
Originally, the novel was hidden in Pan's computer, and he didn't plan to publish it publicly until his wife Zhang Mingxin (played by Chen Ziyao) found out after a quarrel.
From his wife's point of view, Pan is emotionally unfaithful and has a mind full of his cheating partner, but in the eyes of Mira, the novel shocks her, who turns out to be a woman who wants to seduce him, and she asks herself to be "simple, detached, and sacred true love".
Stills from "After Marriage".
After getting married, it was originally a piece of chicken feathers, full of trivialities, and there was not much to say. However, this TVB's new drama uses a new way of filming, allowing different people in a polyamorous relationship to tell this marriage story from the first perspective.
In "After Marriage", the audience sees different causes and consequences of the same thing.
In the eyes of her husband Pan Shanren, her wife is emotionally extreme and will vent her negative emotions to her daughter; in the wife's narration, the husband is reluctant to make progress, and chooses to give up in the face of the opportunity that comes to him, and in order to support the family, he can only start his own business with great difficulty.
The change in the number of episodes is a switch of perspective, and after the idea of blaming a certain character gradually arises, there is a sudden reversal, and after suddenly feeling pity for a certain character, things change again.
This method of switching perspectives has been tested on different TV stations in Hong Kong.
TVB is not new in filming romantic dramas, what is new is that they don't shoot marriage, nor do they shoot white-headed old age, and they don't even provide a lot of drama, they only shoot the details of the relationship to the complexity of daily life, supporting a long and evocative narrative.
After marriage
What happens after marriage?
It's a completely different world from idol dramas, the dream life created by the pink bubble is gradually getting rid of the filter of love, and the beautiful stories of encounters and encounters have entered a long stream, even if the idol comes to the side story, he has to face such torture: What will life look like after marriage?
It's noisy. This is also the first impression of "After Marriage".
In the first episode, he directly explained the background of Pan Shanren, a part-time lecturer in colleges and universities, and his wife are divorcing.
The two have a daughter Yueyue who is in elementary school, and one of the focuses of the divorce is to fight for the custody of the daughter.
What is impressive is the indifference and ruthlessness of his wife Zhang Mingxin, she is trying to find Pan Shanren's weakness and invite a good lawyer to help him appear in court, which is bound to make him "never recover".
Stills from "After Marriage".
"I want a divorce. ”
"Even if I am pitiful, I am to blame, isn't it?!"
"It's all because my wife is crazy enough, isn't it?"
Zhang Mingxin, who was in a divorce lawsuit, her anger that didn't know where to start drowned the first episode of the story. As for her husband Pan Shanren, she has a character that is not good at words and forbearance.
As an educator, he has a sense of nobility that matches his profession, and his good friend Davey (played by Lai Nok Yi) wants to help him expand his network, and he is early on up to the strength of alcohol, and he has indicated that he will seek legal assistance.
At first glance at this story, the audience can't help but ask: Why did the wife become what she is now?
These all indicate the answer at the beginning: because this is the first perspective of her husband Pan Shanren.
Stills from "After Marriage".
When the perspective switches to Zhang Mingxin in the second episode, things have more causes and consequences. It turned out that before getting married, Zhang Mingxin's mother was not optimistic about the relationship between the two, because she was the owner of an expatriate employment center and a cooking KOL, and she had made some achievements in her career, while Pan Shanren was just a contract lecturer with an unstable job and an average income.
When he first got married, Zhang Mingxin tried his best to defy public opinion, believing in and supporting Pan Shanren's dream.
To her heartache, her husband not only cheated, but also recorded these experiences. She found that her husband, who "hadn't written a novel for a long time", had written a new novel in private, and every fragment in it stung her, "just like when he said he didn't love a girl, he actually loved her the most." ”
Zhang Mingxin realized that her husband might still be thinking about the former "third party", and at that moment, she was extremely devastated.
Stills from "After Marriage".
The collapse here laid the groundwork for her performance of trying her best to win the divorce lawsuit and her dislike for her husband, and these are also the details that Pan Shanren intentionally or unintentionally ignored in the first episode.
Interestingly, the screenwriter has an "easter egg" for the role of this TV series, and the actress Chen Ziyao, the heroine of the series, is also in a "confusing" marriage in reality.
After marrying actor Wang Haoxin in the circle, her husband often had scandals, and the marital status of the two has always been a mystery. In recent years, whenever their social platform updates some posts with heartfelt words, some netizens can't wait to leave a message: "Is this a divorce?"
In 2011, Chen Ziyao and Wang Haoxin held a wedding
It seems that TVB is well versed in the casting and promotion of dramas.
It is worth mentioning that the English translation of "After Marriage" is Happy Ever After, which is a sentence often used at the end of Western fairy tales, they lived happily ever after (they lived happily ever after), and with a question mark, the meaning is even more intriguing.
At the beginning of the broadcast of "After Marriage", it was quite optimistic about mainland audiences, and on Douban, the score of the show was as high as 8.8. The continuity of the drama is also very strong, and when the characters begin to be implicated, the divorce drama is not as simple as imagined.
Lift the veil of love
In the plot of "After Marriage" has a total of 20 episodes, it is run through four chapters, namely "divorce", "infidelity", "wrong love" and "repair", and the beginning of each episode indicates who the narrator of this episode is.
The audience soon discovered that in this emotional world between Pan and Zhang, there is actually a four-corner relationship or even more.
Pan's cheating partner, Mira (Wang Minyi), another female character in the story, is a fanatical lover who believes in pure romance and therefore has a special admiration for the talented Pan.
《婚后事》王敏奕饰Look
The portrayal of this relationship is also the most interesting in the play.
In fact, although Zhang Mingxin saw that Pan's novel was full of descriptions of Mira, it was actually just the man's self-righteous affection. He spends a lot of time describing his feelings for Mira, but Mira carefully reads and finds that he is a "woman" in his pen, deliberately trying to tempt him.
At this moment, Mira's worldview, who is also a "literary youth", collapsed. Because from her point of view, love is the most important thing in the world, she hosts the love show of the online station, and is a part-time screenwriter, she likes to output her own love views, and prefers to immerse herself in the fantasies of admirers. When she met Pan Shanren, she thought it was "self-control, no return, simple, detached, and divine true love", so she would rather be a little low—taking care of Pan's children, making breakfast for him, and taking care of his father in the nursing home.
"Love should not be subject to moral constraints, love for someone is not controlled at all, how to distinguish between right and wrong?" is Mira's motto.
Stills from "After Marriage".
Putting aside the moral stance, you will gradually find that due to the deviation of values, the two "love each other" in different time and space.
Mira did everything she could imagine, and even hired a relationship repairer to help heal their relationship, but the funny thing is that Pan Shanren's mind still imagines the feelings of his daughter and wife, and he feels more and more that the so-called "love" is wrong love, and he can't afford and reciprocate.
As for Mira, who is bent on "bitter love transcending all the barriers of the world", she just hopes to redeem herself who has not been recognized in the family from her unruly love.
Looking back at the novel "After Marriage" that made Zhang Mingxin collapse from this perspective, in fact, to put it bluntly, it is just an amateur writer's creation in order to fill the guilt and emptiness in his heart, and it is obvious that what Pan Shanren is good at is hurting others and hurting himself.
Therefore, "After Marriage" reveals this layer of nothingness in the world of desire, people are connected with imaginary others, if these connections without the support of actual feelings are regarded as "affectionate" and "true love", it is actually ridiculous.
In addition, "After Marriage" is not limited to the emotional relationship and entanglement of the Pan and Zhang couples, but also describes the possibility of multiple relationships. For example, after Mira finally realized that she and her married husband Pan Shanren were in wrong love, she vowed to "stop being a love maniac" and instead be a "calm, comfortable, and happy" person.
She chooses her best friend Tianhui, who has always been by her side, and the two are peers who have a common topic, and the latter also thinks that he will wait for Mira to change her mind. So, they chose to chase their dreams together, and after Mira's beloved grandmother passed away, they entered the palace of marriage.
Stills from "After Marriage".
In this chapter called "Repair", five or six years have passed, Tianhui has not achieved much and has become a mediocre middle-aged, but Mira, who has a cute nickname in his eyes, has really become a resentful woman. Tianhui's perspective narrates: Why do I work so hard, but my wife is still dissatisfied?
In Mira's opinion after marriage, the two have been "disconnected". The reason for the disconnection is not related to cheating, but to their concept of raising children, and the concept of family investment is different, one is to work less and spend more time with their son, and the other is to feel that they have no hesitation to work and provide a worry-free environment for their son.
The end is already obvious.
However, because there are too many relationships that the director wants to shoot, every relationship inevitably has a sense of haste in order to "express meaning", after all, there are not many works of this kind of theme, which is a big test for the production team's ability.
Hong Kong-style love Rashomon
In fact, the interspersed shooting narrative of "After Marriage", which is a multi-perspective subject, is easily reminiscent of another iconic work produced by Viu TV in 2020, "Bridge of Sighs".
As a representative work of the same kind of shooting, "Bridge of Sighs" has a more thorough degree of subject transformation, covering the transformation of characters in the 20 years before and after, and the performance of the characters is more three-dimensional and distinct.
In the series, the story of three couples is also shaped. Among them, the triangular relationship played by Lin Baoyi, Wei Shiya, and Chen Hanren is particularly classic.
In "Bridge of Sighs", the triangular relationship played by Lin Baoyi, Wei Shiya, and Chen Hanren is particularly classic/Source: Stills from "Bridge of Sighs".
Just pick a more classic plot to watch, you can find everyone's thoughts and reasons for changes in their relationships.
For example, in the same plot of watching a movie, from Lin Baoyi's point of view, even if the audience was noisy next to him, he and Wei Shiya still watched it very sweetly, and even Wei Shiya laughed dotingly at her decision to leave the scene halfway.
However, in Wei Shiya's narrative, Lin Baoyi is a little "nervous", she will suddenly throw herself down and run halfway through watching the movie, besides, the high heels she wore that day were extremely uncomfortable, the soles of her feet hurt, and Lin Baoyi was also indifferent, at that time, Wei Shiya felt that she and Lin Baoyi were at odds with each other.
In the foreshadowing of similar plots, "Bridge of Sighs" still has a lot of careful details. Different from linear storytelling, when you first see an anti-linear shooting method like "Bridge of Sighs", the first reaction in the viewer's mind is often, who is telling the truth, who is false? When several people's stories rush towards you, the instinct of people is to distinguish "who is lying".
Stills from "Bridge of Sighs".
This kind of certainty about huge and complicated things is the audience's first reaction when watching the drama, and it is also the "sense of confirmation" that people want to get for the first time when facing the world.
However, people are narrators who can be disloyal to themselves. There's no way you can see the whole picture of things from just one person's perspective.
Although the narrative of the intersecting subjects is chaotic at first glance, it actually creates a "Rashomon" atmosphere, which fits the theme that the screenwriter wants to explore social issues other than love and love.
Multi-perspective narration and shooting methods like "Bridge of Sighs" and "After Marriage" have gradually been accepted by the audience, and when such works increase, the audience has slowly let go of the obsession of "you must distinguish who is lying". Because no one can fully understand the cause and effect of another person, film and television works have ushered in creative space, between concealment and honesty, burying all kinds of secrets and humanity in the hearts of people.
This kind of TV series that focuses on shooting level and composition style is very memorable, and it is also a rare creation of TVB that is accustomed to filming short parents and neighborhood affection.
TV series like "Bridge of Sighs" and "After Marriage", which focus on shooting level and composition style, are very memorable/Source: "Bridge of Sighs"
What's more worth mentioning is that this kind of shooting method was born in Hong Kong, which is quite compatible with the city. In Hong Kong romance films, it is rare to see the disguise of "desire", and it is precisely around desire that suspense, romance, reality and other factors are released in this crowded modern city.
Hong Kong romance films are good at impressing the audience with details, and they have a natural sensitivity to capture the minutiae of the relationship, so sometimes just through a few shots, the audience can quickly get a glimpse of the direction of a relationship.
In fact, the characters in these blurry stories do not need us to criticize or forgive, they only need to be quietly felt and understood, which is the best viewing distance created by the director.
When talking about the creative concept of "After Marriage", producer Lincoln mentioned that glorifying human nature and simplifying marriage does not make people happier, and it is necessary for "After Marriage" to face the practical dilemma of marriage.
And this time TVB has impressed us again.
Author | Monet
New Media Editor | Huang Mingting
Edit | Wu Qing
Typography | Rise up Fei Fei