Text by Yi Xiao A-mei
I believe everyone still remembers the winter of 2019. A song "last dance", a cassette tape, Li Ziwei and Huang Yuxuan, their love across time and space, wrote the collective memory symbols of the end of 2019 and the beginning of 2020. The entire Internet was struggling with logic and shedding tears for "Want to See You". The drama "Want to See You" also deservedly became the top drama of that year.
"Want to See You" TV series
On December 23, the movie version of "Want to See You" will meet the audience after three years. We finally waited for Li Ziwei and Huang Yuxuan on the big screen. However, from walking into the theater with high expectations to getting up and leaving disappointed, the movie version of "Want to See You" is just a MV belonging to the series in my heart.
For fans of the drama, no matter what, this MV can awaken the surging memories of three years, returning to the time and space of watching the drama in 2019, once again forming a cycle of memory. The movie version of "Want to Meet You" is more like a medal that fans of the show have witnessed and waited for for three years.
"Want to See You" movie
But for people who "watch movies", the movie version of "Want to See You" does not use movie language to tell a story about Huang Yuxuan and Li Ziwei, but uses the "frame" of the movie to strongly frame Huang Yuxuan and Li Ziwei who ran away from the TV series "Want to See You". Film language only assumes the function of reproduction and reproduction, and loses its own charm of language art.
Back to the story itself, from the discussion of love to the Möbius strip-style "know yourself", "Want to See You", wrapped in the shell of an idol drama, dissects the trajectory of time and space, and finally returns to the ultimate fatalistic cycle of mankind.
The reason why the drama "Want to See You" can arouse the enthusiasm of many viewers is that it attempts to use logical deduction as the time and space coordinate axis of daily narratives to sew reality and fantasy, achieving a "Sisyphus" moment of confrontation between perceptual emotions and rational laws, and everyone in the drama "becomes" the cause and effect of each other's fate. From a dramatic level, it also deepens the fatal relationship under this resistance.
Here, the preparation for daily life and logical deduction is particularly crucial. As a drama series, "Want to See You" uses the scale of a TV series and uses craftsman's meticulousness to create a country that imitates daily life for the audience. From inside the drama to outside the drama, the protagonist group of "Fengnan Squad" has also become famous in one fell swoop, achieving the ultimate emotional weight addition between fiction and reality. Both the characters themselves and the emotional relationship chain of the characters can be extended to the maximum extent.
But the problem is that when the movie version of "Want to See You" still follows the same story structure as the TV series, telling the story of Huang Yuxuan, Li Ziwei, Chen Yunru, three people's souls traveled through time and their destinies were connected, the emotions and realistic logic that originally relied on daily foreshadowing have become "silhouettes" of montage images with background music in the movie version of "Want to See You".
For example, at the beginning of the movie, Li Ziwei and Huang Yuxuan go from their first acquaintance to the ambiguous stage in a milk tea shop. Through a montage of Li Ziwei buying milk tea all year round, accompanied by music, the relationship between the two is exaggeratedly promoted.
Immediately afterwards, the couple went on daily outings, until the stage of watching fireworks on New Year's Eve and confessing to each other. This part is still a montage flash scene with background music, presented in a kind of MV shooting, recreating the sweet romance of a normal couple that we can imagine being together.
Even if I peel off the characters and story filters, the basic core story has not been established, and the process of the two people's relationship advancing the plot is rough and awkward.
Even in the follow-up, when the heroine builds a company team and goes to KTV to sing with everyone, this MV method is still used to push the heroine's current state of mind into the emotional rendering of the MV.
uses music and trivial images to promote the emotional outburst of the characters, just like when we click on the Internet and listen to love songs when we are sad about a breakup.It can be said that in the first few dozen minutes of the film, the film conveys very little effective information, let alone the image narrative that relies on film language.
These flash montages and background music cannot allow the audience to capture any clues about the story, and they have lost the fun of logical reasoning in the drama "Want to See You".
The audience can only rely on a straightforward and boring "emotional effect" over and over again to reach the audience's most superficial movie-watching nerve: the music starts, I know this place, I should be moved.
However, movies are not just about emotions. The success of the drama version of "Want to See You" is definitely not entirely dependent on a perceptual emotional outburst.
As mentioned earlier, the successful magic of the drama version of "Want to See You" actually lies in using mathematical rational thinking to deduce emotional logic, thereby pushing "Sisyphus's Stone" to the top of Olympus . Even if the stone will still fall due to gravity, it will not prevent Huang Yuxuan and Li Ziwei from continuing to travel through their love for each other.
As for the movie version of "Want to See You", from the very beginning, the planning direction ignored the image characteristics of the art form itself, and the essence of the size of the movie and the volume of the series is not more or less, nor is it possible to achieve the presentation of the film language by simply compressing the content of the series in an MV style.
The two have different emphasis on narrative, image function and story structure. The effective time in the movie is not judged by the amount of time, but the movie itself can reshape and transform the timeline through "moving images". Therefore, film is a medium that is more mysterious and can better reflect the ambiguity and chaos of time and space.
Unfortunately, in the movie version of "I Want to See You", the movie has become a "limited time proposition" at best. It can be seen that the creative team tried its best to explain the story and the fate of the characters to the audience within the limited time limit, and even did not hesitate to add a plot summary for Chen Yunru to round out the character's logic. But this kind of filling in the "blank space" also seems to be a mediocre burden for the movie.
The final result of watching the movie is that it is difficult for people to realize that this is a movie through the images, and it is also difficult for viewers who have not watched the drama version of "Want to See You" to feel that in the lyrics, "traveled through thousands of timelines", "exhausted logic and scheming to reason about love", "let time change the seasons, let the universe change or the stars move." "Never out of fashion", these desperate, heaven-to-earth love, and the questioning of the ultimate proposition of mankind that paved the way for more than 20 episodes in the drama version.
The effective "time" in the movie version of "Want to See You" cannot bear the capacity of the drama's story structure. What's more, the first few dozen minutes of this movie are crazy about using music and montage images to create the emotional rendering of the MV, which takes up a lot of space and creates ineffective image narrative.
Of course, what is expected is that after watching the whole movie, the most praiseworthy thing is still the acting skills of the heroine Ke Jiayan . It is only the acting skills of the heroine that made me feel that in the more than 100 minutes of the movie, there are a few moments that return to the moments of watching dramas in 2019.
Perhaps, the moment the movie chose to follow the story structure of the series, the fate of the movie was already doomed. The movie version of "Want to See You" has lost all the essence of the drama version, leaving only imaginary feelings. This feeling may still be worth a movie ticket.
When we sit in the cinema and watch Li Ziwei propose and Huang Yuxuan propose, we will still wipe our tears silently. But these are not directly related to the movie "Want to Meet You".
