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14HS-UZH Asien-Orient-Institut

Dream or Nightmare of the Red Mansions?

To create a dreamlike illusion or let the illusion express itself?

A Review on the new Honglou Meng TV drama


The most significant characteristic of Cao Xueqin’s Honglou Meng (Dream of the Red Chamber) can be summarized into four words ‘in-between reality and illusion’, which turned out to be the biggest challenge during the production. In this case, I had to adopt the Filmmaking technique to shoot this TV drama. Otherwise the dreamlike, poetic imagery in the original classic would be never successfully revivified.

The four-year effort I made is just for fulfilling the four words. If the audience would feel it is a bit like a dream after watching the new TV drama, then I think my strenuous endeavor is appreciated and positively evaluated.”1

- Li Shaohong


In conversation with Feng Lun, a Chinese real estate developer who sponsored the training site and part of the shooting location for the whole production team, the director of the new Honglou Meng TV drama elaborated her creation concept as well as the goal and features of the new adaptation.

To Build a Great Dream

Based on the Chinese classic novel Dream of the Red Mansions, Li Shaohong, the representative female director of the 5th generation in China, continues her consistent aesthetic style of “constructing a great dream” in producing the new TV drama. The whole process from casting, shooting, post-production to the eventual release took her roughly 3 years and cost almost 18 million US-dollars.

Thanks to the hi-tech special effects as well as the abundant financial backing, Li “manipulated” background music, camera work as well as coloration and lighting in a very sophisticated way so that her goal of creating a great dream and enlarging the imaginary space is eventually accomplished.

In view of his international influence and notability, Li invited Tan Dun, known as one of the famous Chinese contemporary classical composers and conductors, to take charge of the music arrangement and production for the new TV series. Quite different from the classical but orthodox musical style of the 1987 version, the background music and soundtrack of Li’s version blends the elements of traditional Kunqu2 with western Opera, so that it not only enhances the mystical ambiance of the whole story, but also delivers the feeling of disillusion.

I would like to take the scene of Lin Daiyu’s death and the simultaneous wedding ceremony of Jia Baoyu (Episode 43, 44) as an example. The fact that various Chinese traditional instruments, such as bamboo flute, zither and Erhu fiddle, are sometimes alternately applied, sometimes collaboratively played, seems to have frozen time and slowed down the footsteps of Death moving closer to Lin Daiyu, the miserable girl who can barely remain her last breath.

One teardrop, an ethereal musical note of Zither; the second teardrop, melancholy strings of Erhu fiddle; three teardrops, four teardrops, five, six, seven…it is striking a sympathetic chord in the audience. Attention is attracted. Hearts are touched. Resonance is aroused. All of a sudden, before the audience thoroughly gets their breath back from the gloomy and despairing atmosphere on Li Daiyu’s deathbed, the shot has already switched to a festival wedding ceremony.

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Mixed up with the cracking noise of fireworks, rumble of drums and gongs, sounds of rigid laughing, anxious humming and whispering, the choir of all kinds of instruments creates a seemingly joyful ambiance. For a second, the audience might be astonished and slightly confused, just like me, a moment later, they must heave a sigh. “One was a flower from paradise. One was a fine jade without stain.

If it is not miraculously predestined, why in this life did they meet again? But if fate had meant them for each other, why was their earthly meeting all in vain…” Again, the shot switches to Lin Daiyu’s sickbed. A female voice repeats the aria of Kunqu opera, which exacerbates the lingering pathos of Daiyu’s fading life.In a postmodern Context, this specific musical genre of the new TV drama is strongly characterized by deconstructionism, that is to say the background music transforms itself into a freehand-style symbol without fixed signify bringing audiences to an artistic space, in which the plot and the musical implication are possible to be interpreted by individual understanding of the audience.

The camera work is Li Shaohong’s another effective approach to create an illusory red chamber. It’s impressive that at the very beginning of the TV drama, a dreamlike landscape that profoundly characterized by Buddhist and Taoist philosophies is displayed by means of special camera angles, for instance the Bird’s-Eye View, for which the camera is placed above the subject, looking down toward the subject and the ground.

This kind of shot can seem disorienting and unreachable because it is rarely the way audiences see the world. But just because of this reason, Li adopts it to make some kind of dramatic comment on characters and to suggest the surreality of the scene. By the same token, in the course of restoring the prosperous secular life in the ancient Gusu City (today’s Su Zhou), the camera work also makes great contribution to improving the illusory aesthetic style.

Therefore, we see three “lunatics” wholeheartedly indulging themselves in a confidential spiritual realm, on the gate of which hangs a big capitalized sign, reads “AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY”. Physically speaking, Zhen Shiyin and the other two also seem to be free from the comings and goings of crowded passers-by who keep moving so quickly that their faces, gestures, even if existence itself have degenerated into misty blurs.

It reminds me another frequent scene in films about contemporary urban life, especially in those romance films: the protagonist is standing motionlessly and perplexedly on the traffic safety island in the middle of a busy street that filled with people and vehicles. His or her being is fragile but real, whereas the other irrelevant pedestrians, the traffic flow, the reinforced concrete buildings and the flashing neon lights converge themselves into a powerful chaos with a sense of existence that gradually fading away.

Although the blending of slow-motion and quick-motion could be a tough trial of audience’s eyesight, it has successfully highlighted the dialectical ideology of matter and emptiness of the original work, which can be also compared to the relation between gain and loss, dream and reality. Just like Zhen Shiyin’s conclusive interpretation of the Won-Done Song “As each one leaves, another takes the stage…Each in the end must call a strange land home.

Each of us with that poor girl may compare who sews a wedding-gown for another bride to wear.”3

Li Shaohong is an aesthete who interprets history, love and morality from a sensitive and delicate female perspective. Her personalized female angle builds a controversial but indeed unique platform, on which Honglou Meng’s aesthetic feature could be untraditionally and multi-dimensionally displayed.4 In the new TV drama, we can see that her concept of “Building a Great Dream” is also approached by an aesthetic application of tinge and coloration.

After the disturbance of a sudden blast of wind, those beautiful and fragile creatures are mercilessly torn off from twigs. Some of them are floating away with the water, while some are straining every nerve to perform their farewell waltz to the accompaniment of Lin Daiyu’s heart-breaking sigh and sob. Surrounded by those dying blossoms and fading petals, Daiyu cannot help speculating her own fate in a pessimistic direction, “Now you are dead I come to bury you; None has divined the day when I shall die; People laugh at my folly in burying fallen flowers, But who will bury me when dead I lie? The day that spring takes wind and beauty fades who will care for the fallen blossom or dead maid?”

No matter how much money has been burned for the whole production process, no matter how cutting edge the applied film technique is said to be, a conspicuous deficiency can be still easily traced in the new Honglou Meng TV drama, namely the immature performance of the young, inexperienced actors and actresses. In my probably stubborn opinion, a successful artistic performance must be based on the profound understanding as well as the proper interpretation of the original work.

The most fundamental approach to achieve this goal is reading and reading again, which, unfortunately, may be the last thing those teenagers managed to do. I don’t mean to slap on the face of contemporary Chinese “entertainment and art circle”, however, the most usual reason for considering “the road to the palace of art”, also simply understood as applying for a place in an art school, is because your score of National College Entrance Examination is not high enough for another utilitarian mainstream subjects, such as economics, laws, medicine, engineering, management science, marketing, foreign language, et al.

Even when they declare they are, I am still very suspicious that their enthusiasm is in fact stimulated by an unrealistic craving of becoming famous and rich. From this perspective, the national-wide sensation caused by the Talent Show “Protagonists of Honglou Meng” (红楼梦中人), which was designed to select actors and actresses for Li Shaohong’s new Honglou Meng TV drama, can be explained with ease.

For those ambitious young people, the casting of Honglou Meng was a golden opportunity to attract public attention in the spotlight. To achieve this purpose, they even ran out of tricks and took advantage of every possible interpersonal relationship. During the Talent Show, rumors like “the hidden rules force young actresses to sell their bodies for the guarantee of starring in the TV drama” or “rich papas sponsor a big fortune of money to make sure their children or secret lovers get enrolled” spread like flies.

Lines are rigidly recited without being truly understood. The most important male protagonist Jia Baoyu is even burlesquely compared to today’s “rich second generation”5 by Li herself, the very person who pledged in all sincerity and seriousness that she would value and reappear the beauty of classic. Unfortunately, this analogy seems more like postmodern deconstruction of the original work, than appreciation and respect.

As we all know, to adapt classic, especially a famous one, into popular movie and TV drama has always been a hard but thankless job. In his book A brief history of Chinese fiction (中国小说史略), Lu Xun comments that since the release of classic Honglou Meng, all the traditional ideology and writing skills have been subverted. “All the stories in the book are nothing but tragic and joyful affection as well as the trivialities of meeting and parting, however the character and plot have forsaken the conventional pattern, which makes the book completely differentiate itself from any other previous Love fictions.”6 Lu Xun’s commentary implies the book’s paramount status in Chinese literature history as well as its deep-rooted influence on Chinese collective social mentality.

There are a thousand Hamlets in a thousand people’s eyes, while there are also thousands ways to read, interpret, de-and reconstruct Honglou Meng. What I am arguing here is not that if the new TV drama is a “pure and total failure”, but whether Li, the ambitious director, successfully injected her own interpretation into her own recreation or not. In another words, whether or not Li has fulfilled her promise of building a great dream? First and foremost, I admit that this great dream has been indeed created with the help of the film technique and multi-channel financial support.

However this “dream” is somehow not truly dreamlike. On one hand, the high-tech elements compel the audience to accept Li’s concept of “the great dream”; on the other hand, the flattening role images as well as the rigid lines and performance are keep reminding people that something goes wrong here. To paraphrase Zhang Ailing, “resembling a gorgeous gown with lice crawling over”, this TV drama is extremely aesthetic, but disappointingly empty; it is materially rich, but spiritually poor.

You may ask: To answer you own question, when would a “Great Dream” eventually become dreamlike? Honestly speaking, I have not got an accurate answer yet. But what I do know is it is not only the Sphinx's riddle of Li Shaohong, but also an interrogation to the whole Chinese literary and art circles as well as our increasingly impetuous world.

Do we still dream a dream?


Reference


CAO, Xueqin, HAWKES, David (Trans.), The Story of the Stone: A Chinese novel by Cao Xueqin in five volumes. Volume 1: The Golden Days, Penguin Books, London: 1973.


HAN, Xiaolong. “xin jiu liang ban dian shi ju Honglou Meng mei xue feng ge zhi bi jiao” [Comparing with the aesthetic style of the new and old version of the “Honglou Meng” TV drama]. In: Lan Zhou Journal, April. 2011.


16.07.2010.


LU, Xun. “zhong guo xiao shuo shi lue” [A brief history of Chinese fiction]. Foreign Languages Press. Beijing: 1959. (Original Text: “全书所写,虽不外悲喜之情,聚散之迹,而人物事故,则摆脱旧套,与在先之人情小说甚不同.)


YANG, Dongxia. “87 ban Honglou Meng dang nian pin lun jie guan dian jing bian, yu xin ban jing yu you duo xiang si” [The edited comments and reviews on the 1987 version of Honglou Meng TV drama: what a similar predicament between old and new versions.]

10.09.2010.

1 Li & Feng: 2010.

2 Kunqu Opera is one of the oldest extant forms of Chinese opera. It evolved from the Kunshan melody, and dominated Chinese theatre from the 16th to the 18th centuries. The style originated in the Wu cultural area including today’s Shanghai, Zhejiang province and parts of Anhui, Jiangsu, Fujian and Jiangxi. In other words, it is the area of Yangtze River delta. Since 2001, Kunqu has been listed as one of the Masterpieces of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity by UNESCO.

Therefore it was entitled as “Mother of Chinese Drama”, “Ancestor of Chinese Opera” or “Master of Chinese Theatre”.

Based on the local culture and tradition, the Kunqu opera was and is sung in Wu dialect, which is usually described in Chinese language as 吴侬软语, meaning the pronunciation and tone are as soft and gentle as the tweet of birds. During Yuan and Ming, seen as the golden era of Chinese drama, the fact that the small commodity economy in Wu dialect region was well developed promoted this area to “a place flowing with milk and honey” in China.

One can image that, under influence of prosperous economy and comparatively abundant life, the Kunqu Opera was inevitably tinged with characteristic of exquisite and elegance. Generally speaking, the singing style of Kunqu opera is mild, lingering and exquisite (水磨调/水磨腔: Water-mill-voice, Water-splashing-like singing style), the costume is gorgeous, the spoken part is elegant, and the general atmosphere is dreamlike and even a little bit ghosty.


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