TV

It Came From the Sinosphere: Laughing In the Wind (Part 2)

August 27, 2013 by Sara K. Leave a Comment

What Sense of Vision!

I have come to really appreciate the films of Li Han-hsiang. He once studied to be a painter, and it really shows in the way that his films are full of beautifully framed. He also happens to be one of the most influential Chinese-language movie directors ever.

This drama gives me the same sense of wonderfully arranged images (the people who made this drama most likely studied the work of Li Han-hsiang during their film studies).

I mentioned the gorgeous scenery in the previous post, but there is much more to making a visually beautiful TV drama than selecting locations well. Aside from the natural scenery, this drama has a dazzling abundance of striking imagery.

Take, for example, this picture of Lin Pingzhi:

I really like the way the windows (with its square pattern) frames Lin Pingzhi, and I like the way Lin Pingzhi’s body contrasts with the shadow of his right arm.

And here’s a shot of Yue Buqun and Ning Zhongze (though it’s hard to tell it’s them):

I think we can agree that it’s not the setting itself that is impressive, but the composition of the stone structure, the sun, the mountains, and the figures which stands out. There’s also the effect of the light and prevalence of grey (which really fits the mood of this particular scene).

And look at these two women in the cave:

It’s a nice cave, but what really makes this image work is the thin, diagonal slit through which we can see the characters. Diagonal lines are generally more eye-catching than horizontal or vertical lines.

I could keep on pulling more and more examples if I wanted, because this TV drama simply has so much fantastically composed images. I just need to pick a random spot in a random episode in order to find more noteworthy images in a short time.

There’s also the attention paid to the characters’ appearances. For example, Yu Canghai and his Qingcheng sect have rather imaginative costumes…

… with the final touch being that, when he’s in a serious fight, he pulls various colorful masks out from his hyperspace arsenal.

And then there are the visual metaphors. For example, as Ren Yingying and Linghu Chong’s romantic feelings grown into a committed relationship, a group of ducklings grow into ducks. And, considering that this is wuxia, and that to be real wuxia, a story has to present someone weeping over an injured/dying loved one (or at the very least subvert this trope), I find it appropriate that we see the mature ducks as Ren Yingying weeps over a bashed-up Linghu Chong for the first time.

This TV drama truly is a feast for the eyes.

… And There’s the Ending

This is such a good drama … and then, at the end, it drops the ball.

Obviously, I cannot describe the problems with the ending in detail without spoilers. But I think I can make some general, spoiler-free observations.

The best comparison I can make (which would be familiar to MangaBookshelf readers) is the first Neon Genesis Evangelion anime. The last two episodes are infamous for disappointing viewers. Of course, that wasn’t the ending which was originally planned, but Gainax went over-budget, so they needed and ending which could be produced cheaply.

In spite of the last two episodes, I still think that Neon Genesis Evangelion is one of the greatest anime ever made (I pretend that the original anime ends at episode 24). Likewise, I think that, in spite of the last few episodes, Laughing in the Wind is one of the best Chinese-language dramas I’ve ever seen.

Furthermore, the last few episodes are still as visually fantastic as the entire drama.

The fact that the ending of Laughing In the Wind diverges from the original novel is not the problem. However, if you change the ending of a good story, you need to change things throughout the story in order to maintain consistency. The Ang Lee version of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon was good about making the necessary changes throughout the story so that, when it does have an ending different from the original novel, it feels natural to the audience. Yet the the ending of the original novel would have felt more natural in Laughing In the Wind than the ending which the drama actually has. To me, that indicates that a) they had probably originally intended to have an ending closer to the one in the original novel and b) the choice to change the ending was probably not made for artistic reasons.

So why change the ending? I can speculate…

– Budget. I don’t think the original ending would have been any more expensive to produce, but maybe I’m wrong about that, and this show went over-budget just like Neon Genesis Evangelion (I can easily believe that it went over-budget at least).
– Other Production Reasons. Maybe they were originally promised 45 episodes, and then an executive somewhere told them that it can only be 40 episodes long.
– Audience Reaction. Maybe they thought audiences wouldn’t like the original ending so much. In that case, they are wrong – I have never seen/read any complaints about the ending of the original novel, whereas I have encountered quite a few complaints about the way that Laughing in the Wind ends.
– Political. It’s well known that many people interpret this story as a political allegory, so maybe some censor wanted to change the ending to de-politicize it. But I think this would have been a silly move. The original, uncensored novel is currently widely available in China, so changing the ending to make it more politically palatable seems pointless.

I think ‘Budget’ and ‘Other Production Reasons’ are the most likely speculations.

Personally, I pretend that Laughing in the Wind ends the same way as the novel.

Availability in English

I’ve already mentioned that it’s available, in its entirety, on Dramafever. It’s also available on Region 1 DVDs with English subtitles, which you can find for sale on the internet very quickly using ordinary search techniques.

Conclusion

This drama feels like it was put together by an exquisite artisan. The casting of the actors is excellent, the scenery is spectacular, the script (barring the last few episodes) is superb, the costumes are imaginative, etc.

Yet it manages to pull off this artistry without ever feeling pretentious. It does not show off its artistic excellence to the audience. Instead, it invites the audience to entire a space which has been curated for virtuosity. It doesn’t need to tell the audience that it’s good, it simply just is good.

I think it is this attention to detail, in addition to the strength of the story itself, which makes this drama such a delight to watch. Highly recommended.

And Then There’s State of Divinity

State of Divinity 1996 is yet another TV adaptation of the same novel. In fact, this novel has been adapted for television a whopping six times (including the 2013 adaptation, starry Joe Chen from Fated to Love You, not to mention two sets of movie adaptations (and this is before we talk about the manhua and video game adaptations).

However, people generally hold up Laughing in the Wind and State of Divinity as being the best adaptations of the novel. Though I’m not familiar with every adaptation, I agree, these are the two best. But how do these two compare with each other? You’ll find out, because next time my subject will be State of Divinity 1996.

And I’m going to lock up the lesser of these two TV adaptations in this cage.

Sara K. just happened to be away from Taiwan proper when a typhoon came along. This is why she was at Fuao harbor an hour and a half before they started selling tickets for the Taima ferry – and the line was already long (lots of flights had been cancelled). She did get a ferry ticket – and while the Taima ferries are usually quite smooth and comfortable, this last ride through an approaching typhoon was the most stomach-churching boat ride Sara K. has ever been on. And the ride lasted nine hours (to be fair, the first 4-5 hours were okay – the ferry wasn’t so close to the typhoon at first). She remained dizzy for over an hour after she reached land (she kept on wondering why the ground was shifting under her).

It Came from the Sinosphere: Yanyu Mengmeng (TV Drama) Part 2

April 23, 2013 by Sara K. 1 Comment

Pouring Sugar on Stakes Thrust through the Heart, or TV Drama vs. Novel

The plot between the novel and this TV adaptation is mostly the same, aside from the addition of new characters (the Li family, Keyun, Du Fei, Ji Yao), and expanded roles for Erhao, Mengping, and Fangyu.

However, the feeling is significantly different. The TV drama does a lot of sugar-coating. For example…

[HUGE SPOILER WARNING + TRIGGER WARNING FOR SEXUAL VIOLENCE / SUICIDE, skip to “End Trigger/Spoiler Warning” if you want to avoid spoilers and/or triggers]

In the novel, Mengping is gang-raped and gets pregnant. When she can’t identify the father, her father stop treating her as his daughter, or even as a human being. After a back-alley abortion gone wrong, Mengping spends most of the novel in the hospital, out of sight. By the time she gets out of the hospital, her mother is in prison, her father and sister are dead, her younger brother is in an orphanage, and she has to live with her older brother, who is penniless.

She is also gang-raped, emotionally discarded by her father, and gets injured in an abortion in the TV Drama. But in the TV drama, her loving sister cares for her after the rape, and her boyfriend agrees to marry her even after he knows what happened. Furthermore, her boyfriend tracks down the rapist and personally punishes them, with some help from Mengping’s father, who starts treating her as his daughter again once a man (her boyfriend) agreed to marry her. Mengping and her boyfriend (later, husband) live happily ever after.

Then there is Ruping.

Mengping and Ruping

In the TV drama, Ruping commits suicide. After the suicide, all of the characters are heartbroken, blame each other for her suicide, blame themselves, and pour out all of the love they felt for Ruping but didn’t express properly while she was alive.

In the novel, when Ruping commits suicide, the characters either a) hardly notice or b) are upset because her death inconveniences them. None of the characters are depicted being sincerely sad that she is dead (well, maybe He Shuhuan is sincerely sad … to some extent).

In the TV drama, Ruping is mistaken to think that nobody loves and cares about her. In the novel … she is mostly correct.

[END TRIGGER/SPOILER WARNING]

Though the plot is mostly the same, these little differences add up to a very different message. In the novel, the message is “What goes around, comes around.” Since what goes around is pain and abuse, what comes around is not pretty. By contrast, the message in the TV drama is that, deep down, everybody loves each other, they just don’t know it, and that love can get you through everything. That is a VERY different message.

Why Was the Message Changed

So … why does the TV Drama sugar-coat the story?

I have some ideas.

First, the novel was written in the 1960s. Many people in Taiwan, including most of the characters and Chiung Yao herself, had been in China during the Chinese Civil War, and were still recovering from the aftermath. The rest of the population had experienced WWII under Japanese rule and the 2/28 Incident, which was also very traumatic. The novel was also published during the height of the “White Terror,” when Taiwan’s authoritarian government practised strict censorship and imprisoned anybody who was inconvenient to the people in power.

By contrast, the 1980s was a much more forgiving era. The economy was booming and standards of living had risen. Taiwan was already moving towards democracy, and in 1987, just a year after this drama aired, martial law was lifted. things didn’t seem so bad.

Then there is Chiung Yao’s own personal circumstances. At the time she wrote the novel, she was a young mother, and had either just ended her first marriage or was about to end it (I couldn’t find a timeline to double-check the order of events), but in any case, ending a marriage while caring for a young child is stressful. She relied on the money she made by writing to make ends meet, so if she had stopped writing, or if her writing hadn’t sold well, she would have been in trouble.

By contrast, in the 1980s, she was financially secure and independent, had well-established and extremely successful writing career, and had been happily married to her second husband for years. Chiung Yao herself says that she couldn’t have written the novels she wrote as a young woman at a later age because she had stopped experiencing such sharp, forceful feelings.

It’s entirely possible that a TV drama faithful to the spirit of the novel would not have been allowed to air in the 1980s. I think that Taiwanese TV nowadays wouldn’t produce a TV show with even the 80s drama adaptation’s level of emotional harshness. Audiences would not receive it well.

In fact, based on the reviews I’ve read, the 2000 adaptation of Yanyu Mengmeng is even sappier than the 80s version.

Why I Hate This Story

For starters, I hate most of the characters … Yiping, Ruping, He Shuhuan, Lu Zhenhua, Xueqin, etc. In the novel, just about the only significant characters I didn’t hate were Fu Wenpei (Yiping’s mother) and Fang Yu. I don’t hate any of the new characters (Keyun, Du Fei, etc.) who were added to the story in the TV adaptation.

Yiping has ulterior motives for going out with Erjie.

Okay, I did feel more sympathetic to Yiping in the TV drama, so I suppose I don’t hate TV!Yiping, but that’s mainly because I felt everybody else was treating her unfairly. Everybody was telling her that she should set aside her hatred for the Lu family, that she was their daughter, and that she should learn to love them. I, on the other hand, felt that not only was Yiping entitled to resent the Lu Family, but I was advising her to cut off contact with them as soon as feasible. Her father abused and neglected her for more than ten years, and her siblings either contributed to the abuse/neglect, or refused to offer any help to Yiping … and never ONCE in the entire drama do they apologize to Yiping and admit to her that they were wrong (his father quasi-apologizes to her mother). If any reconciliation is to happen, I think the Lu family (particularly his father) is responsible for the first move, and before there is a clear and sincere apology, nobody should tell Yiping to let go of her bad feelings about the family.

That’s not to say that I approve of Yiping’s actions – on the contrary, I advised her (in my head) to forget revenge so she can get the Lu family as much out of her life as possible. I also advised her to dump He Shuhuan, particularly considering how inclined he is to use physical force to control her in the drama (at least in the novel he’s not physically abusive). Yiping needs a sassy gay-friend, not a self-centered borderline-abusive boyfriend like He Shuhuan (I personally think Yiping was doing Ruping a favor when she ‘stole’ He Shuhuan, but I know Ruping disagrees with me).

When Yiping wants to get away from Shuhuan, he grabs her, carries her as she’s kicking and screaming, and pins her to a fence. What a charming boyfriend.

And how could I hate Ruping? Mainly because she seems very passive-aggressive to me. She repeatedly claims that she loves Yiping like a sister but … well, it never translates into her actions. When Yiping needs help, Ruping does nothing (and I don’t buy that Ruping doesn’t have enough courage, because she certainly has enough courage when her other siblings get in trouble). And when Yiping is going through some really terrible things, Ruping is caught up in her own selfish concerns. Yiping, at least, is honest about the fact that she is not looking out for Ruping, and even tells Ruping so.

Ruping needs a cool-old-lady friend.

What’s worse, Yiping, Shuhuan, and Ruping are all bookworms. To Yiping, novels are like water, and reading is one of her main mechanisms for getting through the day. Shuhuan has a large library. Yiping loves 19th century European novels – Tolstoy, Bronte sisters, etc., while Shuhuan enjoys contemporary foreign literature. Ruping is a fan of popular Chinese-language literature, particularly romance and wuxia (I find it intriguing that she is an wuxia fan, considering that she’s a total doormat who wouldn’t hurt a fly). I also identify as a bookworm, and I suspect most people who read the novel are bookworms to some extent, so this makes the characters more like the readers.

In Shuhuan’s library.

And that brings me to the crux of why I hate the story – I can see myself in the characters, and it’s an awful part of myself. My family is much more functional than the Lu family – but even I know something about the resentment which builds up between family members, and how it can drive people (myself included) to do terrible things. You could say that I am Yiping’s daughter (my mother as a young woman had some things in common with Yiping). In the TV show, and especially in the novel, I could feel that a) what the characters were doing was wrong and b) understand why they were doing it because, under similar circumstances, I would have the same impulses.

I hate being shown that I can be an awful person.

I seriously considered not watching the TV drama because I hate the novel that much.

My Reaction to the Drama

This is hands down the most addictive TV drama I’ve seen in Chinese, and one of the most addictive things I’ve watched in my life. Even though I already knew the story, I simply had to keep going. As soon as one train-wreck has happened, it’s possible to see the next train coming to pile on the damage.

In some ways, the TV drama is much better written than the novel – many supporting characters are much more fully realized, and the suspenseful elements are more deftly crafted.

And the tears. Oh the tears. In my mind, I’ve re-titled the drama “River of Tears” because of the effect it had on me.

But towards the end of the TV drama, I stopped engaging with it because it started to seem a little false to me. The story wants to go to awful places, but somebody puts on the brakes, assuring the audience, ‘no, it’s not really that awful’.

The ending of novel feels profoundly sad because it feels true. The more optimistic ending of the TV drama does not feel true to me.

Availability in English

Currently, this is not available in English, and since it’s a Taiwanese drama from the 1980s, I am not going to hold my breath. Still, if any Taiwanese drama from the 1980s has a chance of being licensed by a streaming service with English subtitles, it’s this one, or another one of the 80s Chiung Yao dramas.

Conclusion

Nowadays, before I pick up a Chiung Yao novel, I have to ask myself whether I am ready to tear out my heart and put it through the washing machine for cycle. I’ve read that Yanyu Mengmeng is the rawest of them all, but based on some of the summaries I’ve seen, I suspect some of Chiung Yao’s other novels might wrench me even more. She is a genius of pressing emotional buttons.

For a heart-warming Chiung Yao story, read Princess Pearl. Otherwise, beware!

Next Time: Datang Shuanglong Zhuan (novel)

Why is it that Sara K. only found out that the Takarazuka Revue was coming to Taiwan AFTER the tour was over????? Now she’ll actually have to go to Japan to see them perform live. Oh well, if she ever has the chance to see them in Japan, it will probably be better than seeing them in Taiwan.

It Came from the Sinosphere: A Deadly Secret (Part 2)

December 7, 2012 by Sara K. 1 Comment

You may read Part 1 here.

The Fighting

It would probably be unfair to say that the fights in this series are just indiscriminate sword-clanging. But I think most of the fights are no more than one notch above that level.

The thing is, to get good on-screen fighting, you need the following:

1. A good fight choreographer
2. Skilled performers (actors and/or stunt people)
3. Tons and tons of rehearsal time

Now, a great fight choreographer can compensate for less skilled performers, and very talented performers can compensate for a mediocre fight choreographer … but nothing can compensate for a lack of rehearsal time.

All of the above costs quite a bit of money. Particularly the rehearsal time.

I suspect this was outside this TV series’ budget.

Given that they couldn’t afford good fighting, I think they handled the fights pretty well. Though the choreography itself was not exciting, at least the fights moved the story forward. And Jin Yong writes his fight scenes so well that they would be engaging even if the performers were wet noodles.

There were a few fight scenes which did stand out … surprisingly, they were mostly fight scenes which weren’t in the original novel (or maybe that shouldn’t be surprising … when you make up your own fight scene, you can choose to do something which will look good without breaking your budget).

The standout for me is definitely the big fight at the end of episode 25 / beginning of episode 26. I never expected I would say this, but this fight works so well because of the set.

Look at that fantastic ribbon leading up to the stand.

It’s a very scenic way for the fighters to run up…

… and get kicked down.

And that stand is a great place for the fighter to stand above the crowd.

But wait!

The stand gets destroyed in the midst of the fighting!

And we have the two fighters standing on drums, while the stand collapses. Now the space has completely changed. Notice that the fighters are still elevated above the crowd. And notice all of those nice tall yellow-and-red streamers, adding nice vertical lines to the scene. With a set like that, it’s okay if the fighting itself is mostly indiscriminate sword-clanging.

I also need to give points to the costume designer who gave Di Yun such a swishy white outfit. It makes his ~~dancing~~ sword-fighting look more graceful.

Even if you don’t understand Mandarin, I highly recommend watching this fight scene yourself, because I don’t think I can adequately describe it with words and screenshots alone. You can see it in this youtube video (it starts around the 17 minute mark).

Life in an Unjust World

In a way, this is the harshest, bleakest, and most relenting of Jin Yong’s stories. The world is full of greedy people who really aren’t concerned with ethics … and they ruin the lives of the people who actually do follow some ethical principles. Again. And again. And again.

The characters could have easily been portrayed as being just black and white, and I think the TV series does go in that direction for some of the characters. However, rather than showing people as being innately good or evil, it shows that some people choose to prioritize money and power over other people, and let their greed corrupt them …. and other people choose to prioritize other people over money and power. Alas, the people who prioritize money and power tend to actually get more money and power.

Yet when money and power are not involved, the ‘bad’ guys can actually do good things and be very nice people. They don’t want to do evil. They merely don’t mind doing evil.

There is something called the ‘just world fallacy’ (TRIGGER WARNING for the link) – in other words, people want to believe that life is fair. It’s called a ‘fallacy’ because there is lots of evidence that the world is not, in fact, fair.

To pick one example (I could pick many other examples) a bunch of financial firms in the United States bribed politicians to loosen regulations, then violated even the watered-down regulations, committed fraud on a wide scale, blew up a giant housing bubble which made shelter less affordable for tens of millions of people, and which destroyed over 40% of the net wealth of middle-class Americans when it burst. Were the CEOs fired, the financial firms broken down, and serious criminal investigations launched? No! The financial firms got large government bailouts, the CEOs saw their pay increase, tens of millions of people lost their jobs and homes, fraudulent foreclosures are poisoning the centuries-old chain-of-title system which are essential to property rights, etc etc. Oh, and the statue of limitations on their crimes is coming up, which will make them immune to prosecution. This is not what a fair and just world looks like.

A variant of Sartre’s hell: being stuck in the mountains with somebody you don’t like (fortunately, for them, they stop disliking each other, which improves their quality of live).

Justice does sometimes happen in the world, but only by random luck, or when people insist on justice happening. And when people already think that the world is just, they aren’t motivated to do the hard work required to insist on justice.

Most fiction (okay, most fiction that I’m familiar with) supports the just-world fallacy – the good guys win and the bad guys lose. Like most people, I also want to believe the just-world fallacy, so in a way it’s very comforting. Such fiction serves as an escape, which probably is necessary for one’s mental well-being. But I don’t want all of my fiction to be like that.

The TV series does make the story a little more just than the original novel. For example, in the TV series (but, IIRC, not the novel), the bad guys are often plagued with nightmares filled with the ghosts of the people they have wronged. It’s a nice idea that everybody who commits evil is tortured by their consciences, but I don’t think reality always works out that way.

There’s also a new subplot in the TV series where the good guys defeat one of the bad guys very neatly. On one level, I loved watching that, because it’s nice to see the characters I like delivering a character I hate what he deserves. On another level, it makes the world of the story a little more fair, which I think goes a little against the point of the story.

This detestable character finally gets impaled on the spear of justice (the character in the background means ‘justice’). This does not happen in the original novel.

The power of this story, for me, is that it shows that, in spite of the fact that the world is unfair, it is still a wonderful to be alive.

First, integrity is its own reward. Even if you lose, lose, and lose, integrity is still worth something.

Second, there are wonderful people in the world. It is only by staying alive that one will ever have the opportunity to connect with them. And a good relationship is worth the hardship of living in an unjust world.

Of course [SPOILTER] the bad guys blow themselves up with their own greed at the end, and the good guys who are not dead get an ending that is, if not joyful, at least has some contentment. There is a limit to how much unjustness even I can stand in a story, and I’m not sure I could have taken it if the bad guys were all allowed to live happily into old age in luxury. But this story certainly takes the unjustness of the world a bit farther than a lot of other fiction I’m familiar with.[END SPOILER]

I actually find a story which acknowledges that the world is unjust and how to live on in spite of that more comforting than an escapist tale about a just world.

Availability in English

This TV series is, sadly, not available in English. It would be really nice if somebody fixed that. The novel isn’t available in English either. The only version of this story available in English is the movie, which is available on Region 3 DVD with English subtitles.

Conclusion

This … is actually a good TV series. I had my reservations at the beginning, and it took a number of episodes to win me over … but I totally got sucked into the story all over again. If you understand Chinese, I highly recommend trying this.

The movie is also worth watching.

However, my love ultimately belongs to the original novel. Whenever I go back to a story which I had loved before, I’m always afraid that it won’t be as good as I had remembered it. Sometimes my fears prove correct … but not this time. I noticed some flaws in the story which weren’t apparent to me before, but overall it served as a reminder of why I have come to love this story.

Sara K. actually did take a class on set design (as well as a class on costume design and a class on lighting design). She is not a good designer, but she got a lot of practice describing how various designs help or do not help tell a story. The posts she writes about comics would be really, really different if she hadn’t taken those classes … in fact, when she’s writing about comic book artwork, she often feels like she’s talking to one of her design teachers. Of course, it also bleeds into some of her other posts, like this one.