"Hello, Mother" Is adapted from the 2017 novel "On the Clouds, 99 Little Things I Have with My Mother" published by the writer Bad Sheng, and the prose style is more like a "love letter" written to her mother Biyun, with soft, delicate and deep love.
When the book was published, some readers also questioned whether this expression was too emotional and personal, and should not have become a popular product. But what is a work of art? This is the author's excavation of himself, self-peeping and even dissection. These emotional things are written through technical means, or become images, going straight to the recipient's heart for them to empathize.
Italian director Giuseppe Tornadore has spent his life thinking about the way home and the final place of the soul, which he uses the homecoming trilogy to express
Pedro Almodóvar, the most interesting Spanish national treasure director in the eyes of many, has spent his life chasing reconciliation with his mother. He used each of his works to explore and find an answer for himself
The most precious thing in the works of bad students is precisely the willingness to pour out their pain, introspection, and thoughts to the reader. We often say that "parents are here, life still has a place to come, parents go, life is only the way back." "For many families in China, the disappearance of the word mother means to their children that the family is scattered, and you have no roots!"
I read this novel a long time ago, and I took out the re-edition of the novel and re-read it before the TV series began. The image of the mother is still so vivid, and the emotion conveyed by the text still makes people tear up several times.
Let's take a look at what the original author's bad life looks like in the eyes of the mother Biyun?
Leo, as the second eldest in the family, grew up in a patriarchal family, and when she became an adult, she suffered a marriage failure, and was driven out of the family by her husband and Xiaosan when her son was five years old, and finally had to take the child away from home.
She was a fighter in life, fixing wires, building her own kitchen, and making showers. As a tailor, she is still a diy master, using iron plates to make skates for her son, and she can't afford to buy a back and sew a turtle fairy back pad for her son.
She has always seemed very humble, and in her bones she feels that a lot of happiness she does not deserve, and the grace of dripping water wants to repay the spring.
In order to survive, she has been diligent and thrifty all her life, and is proficient in various ways to save money. She took back a variety of free tastings from the New Year's Goods Collection, collected mosquito coil heads, and boiled water and stewed soup at her son's home after the electricity bill was discounted at nine o'clock.
She loves to be clean, and the mother in her son's eyes is always holding a brush in the "bounce". Even with cancer chemotherapy, she is reluctant to sleep in the bed where others have slept, and always have to bring her own bedding.
She loves her children like all mothers - she never eats what the child does not eat, the body of the fish is the child, and the head and tail are her turn.
The reason why I spent so much time talking about Ding Biyun in the novel earlier is also to elicit the questions we want to explore about the character image in this adaptation:
Ding Biyun is the most important and most impressive to the audience, what needs to be shown most?
Naturally, it is the four words "single mother". For the sake of children, even the weakest woman will transform into a female beast with teeth and claws. She has to live desperately, she has to pretend to be strong, which is what we call motherhood.
Ding Biyun in the TV series, starting from the character, the memory point on her body is more the temperament brought by the actor Dong Jie, rather than the character's own growth.
There is a very impressive section of eating braised pork in the novel. In difficult times, the mother will still buy meat to burn once a week for the child's body, naturally, it is a variety of pushes between mother and child. The son will take advantage of the mother's kung fu out to bury a piece of his mother's rice and then pretend to be indifferent, and when the mother finds out, he will laugh and say evilly - I will not eat the meat stained with your saliva. Such a warm little bridge section, let the mother and child rely on each other for their lives, and the concentration of emotions comes out at once. The TV series also filmed this part, but only showed this action, and directly let go in the part that is most worth creating memory points and tear points...
Remember Mother Sunwoo, a single mother in "Please Answer 1988"? The play shows her plight as a single mother: knowing that her mother was coming, she ran to Lady Leopard's house to borrow clothes and food, pretending to be alive and well. But when the mother left, seeing the money left by the mother, for a moment, the sadness jumped on the paper.
Sunwoo himself shaved and injured his mother, afraid that his mother was worried and did not say anything, and collapsed directly when his mother finally found out
She asked the child's uncle to take his son to the bathhouse and teach him what to do instead of the father's role. A total of 10 minutes of several scenes, all the sufferings of a single mother come out...
It's a real pity that these are the tears and protest points about single mothers that we are most looking forward to seeing in the TV series, and the tears and protest points that we are also described in the novel, including the bridges that can create dramatic conflicts, we have not seen in the TV series.
Is the multi-line narrative a glory or a crotch pull?
Multi-line narrative has always been a favorite form of expression in works of art, with Kazuo Ishiguro's debut novel "Distant Mountain Shadow", Gao Zhongxun's animation work "Fairy Tale of Time", and the famous work "Citizen Kane" all using a two-line narrative structure. Novels, the reader can re-watch repeatedly to strengthen memory. The length of the film is also two hours, and the ratio of search and flashback memories in the two-line structure is generally 2:8, and the audience's emotional point is still on the main event.
However, this "Hello Mother Adult" uses a multi-line narrative structure, 30 episodes, one proposition per episode, based on which to construct the story, interspersed with flashbacks to the growth lines of mothers and sons. Coupled with a clue to the son's adult interview at the end of each episode, it is almost a three-line parallel. As soon as the first episode started, some viewers commented that it was already a little bad – why does it look a bit messy?
Even for us, the first thirty minutes of watching the first episode are bouncing back and forth between emotions. It is not until the end of the first episode that it is clear that the story is showing the plot with such a narrative structure.
Because I like this story, I can only convince myself to accept this expression later. But many times, the feeling of watching the drama is that the concentration of just accumulated a little emotion has not been released and is put into the next plot, and this perception continues to the whole play.
I understand very well how producers feel about wanting to innovate, and I feel several times in the process of watching it - the spirit of a story creator who could have easily found another way to innovate for himself is really worth encouraging. But to be honest, this way of presenting is a shackle and shackle to the creators, actors, and post-editing.
If it is a movie, this two-line narrative transition can be very subtle, after all, there are only a dozen scenes at most. But the capacity of 30 episodes of the TV series, a 45-minute plot light design these scenes and the connection between the scenes are enough headaches.
In the first half of the play, we can see the layout of the writer on the transition. For example, the scene about the mother wants to go to the amusement park, and the next scene is followed by the scene of the son of a college student; or borrowing a translation lens to connect childhood and young Ding Xiaojun.
It should be said that the creators have tried their best to find a way to solve the problem of this "dramatic structure". But it still said that the amount is too large, and it is too difficult to do well.
Especially the reporter interviewing this line at the end of each episode, when watching it, there is only one feeling - do you have too much misunderstanding of a host who appears on camera?
For example, if you ask Yi Lijing to interview Han Han, can she roll her eyes and poke people's lung tubes in the context of questioning and questioning? Please, you are a B-B, is Uncle Fei thinking too much?
The casting is excellent, Dong Jie, Yin Fang, Lu Fangsheng are all suitable
I didn't think that this play has an actor who is more suitable for the role of Ding Biyun than Dong Jie, and from the moment when the opening song sounds, the feeling has come out.
Over the years, about Dong Jie, the emotions of many viewers are complicated, more often with a little "want to say something, but do not know how to express" feelings.
What's more, many idle netizens with egg pain described the mode of getting along between Dong Jie and her son Dingding. In any case, her attitude towards her children as a mother does not need an outsider to judge.
Dong Jie took this play, and the first point was probably the empathy of being a single mother. In "Hello, Mother", Dong Jie almost completes all the stages of life from girl, youth, middle age to old age. That's what we said earlier, and the play feels more like an epic of a woman.
Fortunately, although this woman who has experienced a lot has traces of age in the corners of her eyes, and occasionally some photos of going out on the street are also a little tired, she is still a domestic actress who still has a girlish quality.
When Dong Jie went to play Ding Biyun's youth and youth, including being a mother to three actors of different age levels, we didn't feel at all violated. And the love scene between her and Mei Zhong, when a woman faces a love that cannot be done, from heart-wrenching, to fighting for herself, to retreating to finally giving up, it is very painful to see.
Yin Fang, Liu Shishi's classmate and actor who learned to dance, also has a sense of youth.
If you say more about the movie "The First Incense" that he participated in, because of the inconvenience of identity, then you can at least praise his and Yu Feihong's erotic scene. Yin Fang's performance in this play is still very eye-catching, and he is always in a very fixed and warm state in the play. Whether it is in high school or college, even if you go to work, that harmless smile is still a very important point to retain the audience. After all, the clean juvenile smell of white clothes is really difficult for you to catch in the national drama.
Two of his favorite scenes in the whole play:
When he graduated from college and thought hard about the direction of life, he was taken to the liquor bureau by his brother-in-law, and the young brother-in-law who could read poetry in his eyes had been forged by the years into a middle-aged man with a desolate heart and a city servant, and the sense of loneliness when Ding Xiaojun left.
Ding Xiaojun broke up with his first love and learned that his mother's cancer had recurred, and in the fireworks and firecrackers of the New Year's Eve, he walked in the lively streets with tears in his eyes on the snowy night, but the warmth had nothing to do with him.
Mei Zhong, played by Lu Fangsheng, is a new original character, and watching the producer's previous interview should be a random mention in the novel - the mother's letter.
The love drama of two people is romantic and "born". Even Umezawa's confession is a very Japanese, very literary expression, borrowing a small hair from anecdote about Natsume Soseki - tonight's moonlight is really beautiful. Lu Fangsheng himself went to college in Japan, and he played so many roles but really did not have the charm of the amazing glimpse in this play.
The camera crew represents the highest level of contemporary television drama
Speaking of director Cao Dun's slightly complicated emotions, his first impressive TV series directorial work was "Children Are Difficult to Raise" broadcast by Hunan Satellite TV many years ago, starring Chen Sicheng and Xiao Songjia. He used a lot of handheld lenses in the scene and also pioneered the filming of TV dramas in 2012. But the audience's evaluation is somewhat polarized, and some viewers are directly stunned by the camera and leave a question - can't you videographers even hold the machine? Naturally, we can't criticize the audience for not understanding our advanced, after all, TV dramas are still popular product types.
After that, Director Cao's work is still stylized and avant-garde. For example, "Wolf Hunter" was shown in a magnificent shot at the beginning, but after an episode was broadcast, I just wanted to ask - is this not an anti-poaching theme of the police film?
"Hello Mother" instead returns to the expression of down-to-earth creation without showmanship, and the entire lens expression language is very valuable for the presentation of the text. There is an impressive scene when Xiaojun is educated by his mother because he plays games, and the director gives a shot fixed on a chick outside the house.
This kind of shot is not invalid, but rather an imaging language presentation as a director who shows his skills in the play. This expression has also been seen in many favorite plays recently, such as Bong Joon-ho's deputy director Shinzo Yama's short drama "The Blade of Wandering" based on Keigo Higashino's original book for Wowow TV, and the highly acclaimed Chinese drama "The Age of Awakening", you can see many meaningful imagery empty mirrors designed by director Zhang Yongxin.
The art of the play is a good restoration of the unique architectural beauty of the northern Jiangsu in the novel, such as green tiles, white walls, long stone streets, and small bridges and flowing water.
And when night comes, the design of the scene is also very careful.
Another point that must be mentioned is the lighting of the play, which is really worth adding a chicken leg to the teachers.
The drama borrows a lot from the "sky light", you will see a lot of sunset scenes, warm halo hit the faces of the protagonists, the warm feeling created by the light and shadow, very comfortable.
In some indoor scenes, it is not necessary to deliberately use "big white", but to create a different and interesting texture of life. When watching the drama, I often applaud the use of these movie-watching effects. It really contributes to enhancing the warmth, transparency and texture of this play, which is a plus.
Note: The picture of the drama comes from the Internet