Author | Mia
From the start of filming, the start of the broadcast to the end, the much-anticipated spy war drama "Harbin 1944", whether it is popularity, texture, or word of mouth, can be called worthy of expectations.
Since its broadcast, the show has broken the record of breaking the fastest popularity of 8500 in 24 hours since it was broadcast on iQiyi, and multiple data platforms such as Yunhe, Maoyan, Lighthouse, and Detawen have continued to lead...... From the infinite reversal, the revelation of identity to the echo of details, and then to the exploration of human nature, it is finally woven into a thick historical picture that condenses the flavors of the world and outlines the grand era, which is worth savoring repeatedly.
And the soul of a good drama must lie in "excellent character building". Compared with traditional spy war dramas, "Harbin 1944" has taken a step further, it uses vivid group portraits of characters, and their respective fate choices, to answer the ultimate question of life: In the troubled times of "living until the end of the year, even if you are happy and mourning", how can ordinary people settle down and seize a beam of light that keeps them from falling into the infernal hell?
On various social media platforms, what made countless viewers sigh and empathize with tears was a "big villain": "Guan Xue" created by Yang Mi. Guan Xue, who is as beautiful and poisonous as a poppy, is destined to be unforgettable for all audiences. How does the actor's performance and the character have a strong chemistry that becomes a key stroke in the whole work?
smash the face of the "female spy" and reread the magnificent history from Guan Xue's perspective
Looking at the entire drama field, spy war dramas with strong reversals and outwitting are the genres that are easy to explode, and they are also the most mature genre in national dramas. Under the premise that almost everyone can blurt out a few classic spy war dramas and classic characters, innovation has become a difficulty.
What needs to be seen is that most of the traditional spy war dramas start from a male perspective, and female characters, especially female villains, are often single-faced, reduced to the foil of the male protagonist's affection and wisdom. As the audience threshold increases, the market craves more three-dimensional and multi-faceted characters that can withstand repeated tastes.
(Source: Weibo @小fang帝)
"Harbin 1944" attempts to depict the big era with small incisions, explores eternal human nature with small people, and chooses the image of female spies that are very different from those of predecessors, as well as innovative narrative perspectives.
The villain heroine Guan Xue in the play is no longer a vase, but a flesh-and-blood person, a spy leader who is strong enough in force and intelligence, and also has emotional weakness, is a hateful and pitiful, cold-blooded and cruel villain, and the male protagonist Zhuo Wen has been "on par" with countless extreme games, and its strong and complex core can support the audience to chew and taste repeatedly.
Bearing the hatred of the "last generation of Gege", Guan Xue, who crawled out of the sea of corpses and blood, fell into the dark abyss, underwent cruel training, and struggled to survive all the way to survive.
She repeatedly tested Song Zhuowen; calmly said to Hu Bin, "Come back to Xinjing with me, and then go to Japan", and the latter was also shocked by the ruthlessness of leaving others behind for her; When she heard that Pan Yue and Hu Bin were going to find another "backer", she followed Lao Jin's suggestion to arrange a killer to assassinate Song Zhuowen, and blamed Pan Yue to kill people with a knife, killing two birds with one stone; In order to protect his younger brother Guan Kai, when he promised to marry Hu Bin, Guan Xue hid a gun in his bag and was ready to kill Hu Bin at any time.
Guan Xue has a complete family line, love line, career line, and character growth arc, which effectively supports and strengthens the character's internal behavioral logic and motivation, making this character full of credibility and realism, and gradually understood by the audience.
This "forced to cut off the braids and freeze the heart", subverted the image of female spies in the past, and shattered the cookie-cutter "bad guy face", for actors, such scripts and roles can fully stimulate the desire to create, for the audience, it is a performance feast, and it also broadens the understanding and cognition of human nature.
(Source: Weibo @小fang帝)
Through the portrayal of this key figure and Guan Xue's perspective of "experiencing history", "Harbin 1944" attempts to convey a grand view of history: to see the big from the small, and to refract the positive with the negative, so as to analyze the inevitability of history.
The female perspective brings more emotional experience and enriches the narrative of spy war dramas. The villain's perspective provides "another fresh perspective", in which the lives of civilians in troubled times are like mustards, in stark contrast to the absurdity and atrocities of the rulers; The true historical fact in Guan Xue's mouth that "eating rice must be divided into three, six, nine and so on" is chilling; The direct and indirect presentation of the human experiments of Unit 731 is the bloodiest page in modern history.
(Source: Weibo @·winterson·)
Guan Xue's cruelty to the tiger again and again, as well as the painstaking planning of the remnants of the Manchu Qing Dynasty, finally came to naught, allowing the audience to more deeply understand the historical inevitability of why the Japanese puppet Manchu rule was bound to lose and New China must win, and completed a profound patriotic education, as Guan Xue said, "There are really people who don't even want their lives for people they don't know", "We can't win them".
The word-of-mouth reversal of "getting rid of beauty": a more multi-layered Yang Mi
Actors with a sense of conviction give life to the story, transforming it from the text of the script into a visually striking picture. When the characters are no longer "black and white", their complexity and multifaceted nature also bring greater room for actors to play and recreate, and it also means greater difficulty and challenges.
How to make Guan Xue, a new female spy, "stand up"? This will inevitably require a deeper level of understanding, a more complex and multi-layered interpretation.
In the 40 episodes of the drama, as the villain heroine, Guan Xue's character background is layered and rich, through the performance of a long span and different scenes, the character image is constantly improved and reversed, so that together with the other leading actors, the dramatic tension of the drama is supported, and the mood gradually rises, until the final curtain call erupts, hitting countless people's tears.
(Source: Weibo @柒月yueyue)
At the beginning, the "ruthless character" Guan Xue was known as one of the "three evils of Erbin", and her "ruthless and vicious" was famous far and wide: in Pan Yue's mouth, she "took off the cheongsam on the body of the woman who was about to die, and took half a tube of blood to wipe herself, based on this alone, you and I are inferior to her." In the interrogation room, she walked leisurely, regarded life as a mustard, and roared at her subordinates, "The interrogation room should not be a morgue, it should be the delivery room of the secret service department, you have to ask for something, what's the use of carrying the corpse out every day?" Don't be angry.
Although Guan Xue seems to be often "angry", she is actually suspicious and intelligent: at the beginning of the temptation of Zhuo Wen, her expression was full of suspicion and vigilance when she turned her back, and she immediately switched to a sweet smile as soon as she turned around, and the external "face change" portrayed the character's deep-seated "fickle" personality.
As the mystery of her life and the scars of the past are uncovered layer by layer, why Guan Xue became Guan Xue also has enough logical and rational support. As a descendant of the Guerjia clan, Guan Xue is not completely loyal to the invaders, and regards the delusion of restoring the empire as a life support, which is sad and lamentable.
In countless chess encounters with Zhuo Wen, she used the appearance of a "love brain" and a "jealous" little girl to make everyone let down their guard and despise her, and the hint of two playing cards on the gambling table shows that she has long been aware of the secrets of the twins, and the image of the "egoist" who puts the first person is about to come out. But she is not inhumane: her true affection for Zhuo Wen makes this character more thick, arousing the audience's empathy.
(Source: Weibo @·winterson·)
In the early stage, it seemed to be "irritable and overforced", but in the second half, a big reversal at the character level was realized: all fragile, fierce, and morbid were her disguises, and at the same time, "Yang Mi's acting reputation reversal" caused heated discussions, and voices such as "I was deceived by Guan Xue" and "I'm sorry I was a little louder before" are endless.
In terms of detailed analysis of limbs, micro-expressions, eyes, etc., what we see is a completely different Yang Mi. Perhaps a more accurate expression is that at that moment, you will forget that she is Yang Mi and believe that she is Guan Xue.
How to perform different subtle layers and differences in eye drama and crying scenes in different scenes, and how to infect the audience through real and powerful emotional outbursts are important criteria for evaluating the quality of performances.
The opening "Guan Xue took the bullet with his bare hands" received millions of likes on Douyin, she went from trembling all over, unable to hold the hemostat, to cold sweat, hissing in low pain until she was paralyzed, and the audience shouted "How much it hurts across the screen", the image of the "Iron Lady of the Special Service Section" with a stubborn and fierce expression and never tears no matter how much it hurts jumped on the screen, which also laid the groundwork for the heartbroken crying at the end;
Or when Guan Xue rushed upstairs to her younger brother, she hesitated because of great fear at the moment of going upstairs, her eyes in disbelief, and then waved her hand and shouted to the people around her not to look, but she wanted to hug her brother who hanged himself but couldn't hold it, so she carefully held him, and his eyes gradually turned to gray;
When she finally confronted Zhuo Wen, she knew that she had completely collapsed after killing her lover many years ago, and she burst out of her eyes from tears, and then she was short of breath, trying her best to restrain herself, her muscles were bursting out, she choked until she burst into tears, swallowed food alone and ate until she retched, which was not beautiful but shocking, which was completely different from the loud crying after closing the door before, which made the audience have more complex feelings about this character.
(Source: Weibo @·winterson·)
As stated in "The Self-cultivation of Actors", "Acting needs to mobilize the conscious thoughts and psychology of actors to achieve the subconscious creation of nature." In rehearsals, actors need to find internal motivations to justify their actions and complete stage actions in a prescribed situation. ”
In many scenes of "incarnating characters", Yang Mi completely abandoned the past performance methods, completed difficult challenges, and imperceptibly promoted the audience to achieve emotional changes, hating the role of Guan Xue, and changing her acting skills from doubt to recognition. The next few highlights have become the highlights of the characters, so that the audience will still be immersed in the aftertaste for a long time at the end of the play.
Detaven data shows that "the villain is real", "word-of-mouth reversal", "strength recommendation" and "I like Yang Mi's interpretation of Guan Xue" have become hot words in public opinion, and the main theme drama has expanded Yang Mi's audience of all ages. The process of actors taking the initiative to "leave behind their beauty" and making great efforts is actually a process of challenging themselves and achieving transformation. This time, it was Yang Mi who had never been seen before.
Emotional scoring: The damage of chaos in the fan circle to actors
Unfortunately, for "Harbin 1944" and Yang Mi himself, some voices that are not objective and rational have affected the rational judgment of more audiences to a certain extent.
has been in the traffic outlet for many years, but whenever there is a new movie series launched, Yang Mi will always bear more attention, and at the same time, he will also be subjected to more "hacks" that may be unfair. As Detaven data pointed out, "Yang Mi's recent audience is distributed in all tier-level cities across the country, and the proportion of male and female audiences of all ages is relatively balanced." The solid national degree accumulated over the years of debut, as long as the work is broadcast, Yang Mi is bound to become the center of the topic. ”
On many platforms such as Douban and Douyin, some copy-and-paste negative short comments can be seen everywhere, and some users "haven't watched or only watched the slice and give one star to vent their emotions", and the malicious discussion that deviated from the content quality of the drama itself further affected the score of the series, making some unaware viewers miss an excellent drama and the hearty group drama in it, and accelerated the deterioration of the public opinion environment. This is not fair to all the creators' painstaking efforts and a large number of one-to-one reproductions of the carefully restored details.
The above-mentioned chaos in the fan circle is a bad legacy of the era of only traffic, fueled by capital. Under the preconceived colored filter, some viewers lose the ability to think and judge independently, and follow the trend to join the online carnival, which is not conducive to the growth and progress of the actors, and also hurts the actors' positive and enterprising spirit.
In our opinion, "Harbin 1944" and Yang Mi's own acting skills are underestimated. For example, Pan Yue's mouth mentioned "Zhuo Wen is like a movie star Pu Ke", and Pu Ke's own debut work is "True and False Sisters", laying the groundwork for the secret of the twins; The details of Zhuo Wen eating yellow noodles restore the dark era when "Chinese can't eat rice", and a series of details rooted in real history support the texture of the series.
From the perspective of character building, from Guan Xue to the people in the secret service department, they can be described as distinctive, vivid and convincing, and their fate also affects the hearts of every audience. This time, the collision adventure of the top team is quite surprising, and the degree of completion is far above the level line, but unfortunately the current pink and black war has affected the reputation of the series, and it has also made the actors suffer a lot of undue criticism. Over time, there may be a fairer assessment.
For any actor, the courage to "challenge oneself, expand boundaries, and start anew" is worthy of recognition. After Guan Xue, what kind of sparks will the next character collide with? For Yang Mi, who has debuted for more than 20 years and left many classic role memories, we look forward to a more different and special screen and screen answer next time.