The TV version of "Flowing Golden Years" starring Liu Shishi and Ni Ni ended shortly after, and the discussion about this hot drama is still fermenting. Regardless of the pros and cons in terms of conception and production, the show's ability to focus on positive, strong female friendships, even at the expense of drama, is a rather courageous attempt in itself. Coincidentally, the "Amazing Girl" starring Li Yitong and Jin Chen, which was launched at the same time, also played the female friendship card, plus the upcoming period drama "Double Mirror" is also set for the double heroine, no wonder some people say that the boom of the double heroine drama is coming again.
The high popularity of "Flowing Golden Years" since its broadcast proves that the story centered on female friendship has a great audience. But in fact, the interaction between the two heroines is not only this mode, but ultimately to create a credible and in-depth character. In this sense, there are more untapped styles for dual-female film and television dramas.
The character arrangement of the two heroines alone cannot be regarded as a genre, and what is really bold is that "Flowing Golden Years" portrays the positive and strong friendship as the most important character relationship, daring to sacrifice drama
In fact, the character arrangement of the two heroines alone cannot be regarded as a type, and this setting will produce various possibilities such as mother and daughter, colleagues, opponents, sisters, superiors and subordinates, etc., and will also evolve into works with completely different flavors. What is really bold is that "Flowing Golden Years" portrays positive and strong friendships as the most important character relationships, daring to sacrifice drama. Compared with male friendship, women's friendship has always been relatively poor in film and television, and there are not many successful precedents to follow.
The two protagonists of "Flowing Golden Years", Jiang Nansun and Zhu Suosuo, are each other's best friends from beginning to end, and there is no estrangement in between, which is an adventure. The opposite of the safety card is the lack of conflict elements, just like the film and television drama depicting love has no twists and turns.
The setting of the pair of friends retains the skeleton of Yi Shu's original work, in fact, this novel is also an exception in Yi Shu's famous works, lock lock and Nan Sun represent two kinds of heroines in her early novels, one is the beautiful legend of "The Story of the Rose", and the other is a professional woman who is closer to her own life experience, and people with hearts may be able to explore the swing between attachment and independence of metropolitan women in the 1970s and 1980s. "Flowing Golden Years" combines both in one, and the story lines of the two people are divided and combined. The novel is more suitable for adaptation into a series than a movie, because the TV series has the advantage of multiple perspectives compared to the movie, and can show multiple story lines at the same time. But I have to say that the drama of the original novel lies in the story of the two people, although the two people are each other
Support and witness each other's life events, but such a peaceful friendship cannot create a plot - the novel can also rely on Yishu's signature golden sentences to grab the reader's attention, but the drama version cannot rely on dialogue similar to the philosophy of life alone. Although the two in the play directly participated in their respective lives, in the end, they failed to make up for the weakness that the relationship between the core characters was not attractive enough. Although there are many rival scenes between Ni Ni and Liu Shishi, because the friendship between the two characters is always constant, in addition to repeatedly expressing unconditional support for each other, it does not deepen the role of feelings, nor does it dig deep into the various levels of friendship development from teenager to adulthood.
Stories dominated by female characters, even genre films, were considered intimidating by the producers for a long time. The relationship between women is more often expressed in film and television dramas as vicious competition and trickery
Perhaps because the friendship that has always been strong lacks dramatic effects, the two-heroine film and television drama that has always been more successful has almost always taken the conflict route, at least the relationship between the two will not change. The international killer in "Kill Eve" and the MI5 agent Eve are evenly matched and attracted to each other; "Nemesis: Betty and Joan" dramatizes the open and secret struggle gossip of Hollywood movie stars Joan Crawford and Betty Davis; the crash and the working girl in the sitcom "Bankrupt Sisters" are partners who hate each other while doing business; two good friends in the movie "July and Ansheng" fall in love with the same man, and the two have opposite attitudes to life, and can only look at each other in the end; the classic Qiong Yao drama "The Lost Sisters" is a partner who hates each other while doing business; two good friends in the movie "July and Ansheng" fall in love with the same man, and the two have opposite attitudes to life, and eventually can only look at each other; the classic Qiong Yao drama "Qiong Yao" Ziwei and Xiaoyanzi in "Huan Zhu Gege" are true and false princesses with different identities, and the trust between the sisters with different surnames is being tested at any time, and after repeated misunderstandings, a sisterhood that convinces the audience is established. Even the real sisterhood seems to have a natural conflict element, which is often used to create contradictions: the sister in the TV series "A Curtain of Dreams" and "Empty Mirror" lived in the shadow of her sister at the beginning, and her career and love were not as good as her sister, interestingly, the sister in "A Curtain of Dreams" is an idealist, the sister in "Empty Mirror" is an idealist, and in the end, the sister in turn gets a happy life that her sister can't get, and the difference in the creator's values can be found when compared. Establishing dramatic character relationships is also a common technique used in male group portrait dramas, the brothers in "The Pretender" have secrets that cannot be said, and the character relationships in the military theme of "Soldier Assault" and "My Regiment Commander My Regiment" are officers and soldiers who manage and are managed.
Of course, friendship does not have to be presented in the face of contradictions and conflicts, such as "buddy comedy" is an enduring film genre, from independent to commercial, from excellent to mediocre examples. Far from it, in the past two decades, Hollywood movies can casually count "Glass of Wine Life", "Hangover" series, "Tear-resistant Detective", domestic films such as "Chinese Partner", "Detective Chinatown", and last year there was a "Home at One Point", several protagonists got together to start a business, travel, adventure, investigate cases, chase girls, and do stupid things. In addition to comedy, traditional war films, superhero films and action movies all celebrate the love of men's robes, and the emotional scenes in which female characters participate are often chicken ribs, and it is more refreshing and smooth to abandon.
In contrast, stories dominated by female characters, even genre films, have been regarded as intimidating by the producers for a long time, judging that there is no audience. There are very few such a thriving work as "The End of the Road", so it is labeled as feminist, although it is deserved, it also indirectly shows that although there are many road adventure films, as long as the protagonist is replaced by a woman, it becomes a different kind, with an indigestible rebellious atmosphere.
Unfortunately, the relationship between women is often expressed by overseas film and television dramas as vicious competition, trickery, and even because of various trivial things to trip each other up. Around the millennium, youth films such as "The Lone Wolf" and "Mean Girl" are almost the initiators of "plastic sisterhood", and the subsequent youth drama "Gossip Girl" has not updated this kind of story, two New York Upper East Side girls are competitors in all aspects, casually turning their faces, and various reality shows since the new millennium, from "Walking with the Kardashian Family" to "Beverly Wives" series, are selling points to varying degrees with women, such stereotypes must be far from the actual feelings of many people.
In recent years, the eye-catching female friendship stories have come from film and television dramas set by the two heroines, but the side-by-side interaction mode between the two protagonists is to create believable and in-depth characters
In recent years, many film and television works have emerged to justify women's friendships. The female version of "Hidden sky across the sea" and "Ghostbusters" are more obvious examples, and the female group portraits represented by "Ode to Joy" and "Thirty Only" are on par with the classic TV series "Sex and the City" and "I Have a Date with Spring", showing mutually supportive girlfriends, female friends cheerleaders for each other, and also sincere critics of each other. However, the line of friendship often comes second in these female group portrait dramas, and is a gas station interspersed with the love and career stories of several protagonists.
In recent years, the eye-catching female friendship stories have come from the film and television dramas set by the two heroines. The movie "High-achieving Students" tells the story of a pair of good students who decided to be bad students on the last day of high school to make up for the forbidden happiness they missed, and the chain of events that occurred within 24 hours made them realize that these years of studying hard for the ideal university is not sacrificing happiness, because the friends who know best about their classmates have always been with them. A pair of friends in the two-season school comedy "Pen Writing Youth" are played by adults, but they are set in middle school around the turn of the millennium. The show rarely captures the gravitational field unique to adolescence, and many adults forget that during the time between childhood and adulthood, the impact of subtle events will be disproportionate. The pair of good friends rely on each other to fight each other's isolation at school, but often the biggest harm is the neglect or misunderstanding of the good friend, they of course desire to be recognized by other classmates, but they always care more about themselves in the eyes of the good friend, these unspeakable emotions are far more subtle than the common intrigues in school dramas.
Ending in the fifth season, "Big City Chicks" is an uncompromising comedy drama, and it has also greatly opened up new types of women's friendships on the screen. Two girls in their 20s stumble in a big city, but it's not a "struggle" style bloody story. They treat New York City as a playground, and any strange idea will not be impossible for each other here, and the embarrassing scene becomes a joke because of each other's presence. French New Wave director Jacques Rivette's Voyage of Celine and Julie in the 1970s (some critics believe it is the precursor to David Lynch's Mulholland Drive), also has two inseparable close friends who are equally keen to liberate creativity in fantasy and daydreaming. Friendship became the most important relationship in "Big City Chicks" because they were each other's most enthusiastic audience, because only the other person could understand their jokes, and because they all felt that "you made me think I was so cool" - in the age of rushing to realize their individual value, they received the greatest recognition from each other. This is a breakthrough attempt, the female friendship that used to be played in love stories has gained subjectivity, and it is manifested as an indispensable interpersonal relationship that helps form personal identity, and like love and family affection, it teaches us what to give and give. At the end of the play, they finally want to separate for their respective careers, saying seemingly contradictory parting words: "We will not be separated, we must be separated", and the adult world has come to test how much they have grown in this friendship.
Based on the best-selling novel "Neapolitan Quadrilogy", the Italian TV series "My Genius Girlfriend" preserves the gray and cold tone of the original book, and two girls who grew up in a small southern town after World War II fight poverty together and constantly resist the debasement from patriarchal society, and their friendship is based on the desire to break away from the environment in which they grew up, but the different ways they use are doomed to temporary separation. Friendships are fragile, and as the growth trajectories of the two sides differ, they will fade without the need for additional contradictions. The two gifted girlfriends, one chooses to continue their education, the other chooses to get out of poverty quickly by marriage, but they both constantly encounter greater obstacles, constantly struggling between patience and outburst, and they realize that these things can only be understood by their childhood friends who read "Little Women" together. Every time the two reunite, they understand each other between three or two sentences. The feelings between them are of course competitive, but more is to appreciate each other, appreciate each other is to learn to accept themselves, only to find self-confidence, will show that you are great, I am not bad calm, their friendship because of their maturity has also grown, because knowing that there is still a "you" in the world, "I" can not relax, should not forget the childhood dream.
Looking at Jiang Nansun and Zhu Suosuo in "Flowing Golden Years", they look intimate and can insert knives into each other's ribs, but this is just a general imagination of sincere friendship. Friendship is no better than family affection, unreserved love needs to be explained, why are they willing to take each other's burden as their own? A simple test is not enough to see whether the friendship is deep enough: Do they enjoy each other's company when they are not talking about other characters? We don't know, because there are very few times like this. The friendship drama in the film and television drama that cannot pass this test may be called "plastic", to put it bluntly, it is just the character's inner monologue, adding an audience.
The double male protagonist setting has become the mainstream of popular TV series, "Chen Qingling" and "Sideburns Are Not Begonia Red" are all topical works, and the double female protagonist drama is not the opposite of the double male protagonist drama, and it also faces creative challenges - the interaction mode between the two protagonists, whether it is conflict and hostility or fighting side by side, is to create a credible and in-depth character and serve. The high popularity since the broadcast of "Flowing Golden Years" proves that the story centered on female friendship has a great audience, but there are more untapped styles of female friendship, and success or failure lies in whether it can shape a rich female character through friendship.
(The author is a film critic)
Author: Huang Xiaomi
Source: Wen Wei Po
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