List of high-quality authors It cannot be denied that "Flowers" directed by Wong Kar-wai and starring Hu Ge, Ma Yili, Tang Yan, and Xin Zhilei is very good-looking.
Mr. You Benchang's amazing acting skills; Under the director's lens, the image is full of artistic charm of light and shadow, and all the protagonists and even all the characters are very eye-catching and pleasing to the eye; Plot aside, each character has also performed brilliantly under his personality, and the series has a large number of wonderful moments and highlight moments of different characters; The setting and costumes of the drama are extremely elegant, exquisite and ......
All of these add up to make "Flowers" very good, and it is incomparable to many TV series.
Despite this, in terms of personal viewing experience, "Flowers" is not a good TV series for the following three reasons.
Lacking in plot, the whole drama is particularly like a radio drama or a super long commercial blockbuster that can be watched. The series is full of lines, dialogue, and voiceovers, lacking enough story and plot, and all plot development is based on telling rather than storytelling. The plot of 30 episodes can be simply summarized as the male protagonist looks the other way for his first girlfriend, struggles desperately, and becomes a business figure who can call the wind and rain on the Yellow River Road, and in the process of developing his career, he meets three other different women and has emotional entanglements with them.
It's like a radio drama because the show replaces the plot with too many voice-over monologues or narrations, and the audience watching the show is a bit like sitting in a hall with a fire and listening to several main characters tell a story around the fireplace. It's just that the stories they tell can't be seen by the audience, because the series is not filmed, and what the audience can see is that the protagonists are very engaged in "speaking". To some extent, it is even said that the whole show relies on the voice-over monologue or narration of the male protagonist Po to drive the rhythm.
It is said that it is a super-long advertising blockbuster, firstly, because there are too many explicit or implicit advertisements implanted into the content of the feature film; The second is because there are too many "golden sentences" that appear in the lines and dialogues of different characters, and almost every person in the play is a master of golden sentences, especially like an advertising copy that jumps out at the right time.
Most of the protagonists only have characters who can't stand up to questioning, and there is no convincing life story. In fact, the problem is essentially the lack of storyline and collateral effects of the series. A good enough storyline not only connects all the characters, but even if the characters don't say a word, it still allows the audience to see the relationship between the characters and the development of things. But such a wonderful story, "Flowers" does not.
I privately think that many of the characters in the series are very charming, but the most successful character in the series is relatively Miss Wang. She is the most solid and complete character in the whole play. She has a background, a family, a life, love, and a career, she has had a glamorous and infinite scenery, and she has also been disgraced and embarrassed. The series uses enough stories and detailed scenes to present all aspects of Miss Wang, and maintains her vigorous and stubborn upward force in the plot setting, which is very infectious.
However, it is a pity that this kind of solid story design and foreshadowing is only possessed by Miss Wang. The other protagonist groups all rely on voice-overs to plump up character information, and without those voice-over lines, you can't see too many stories or plots of the protagonists' growth. Whether it's Bao, Reiko, or Li Li, it's the same.
Taking Ah Bao as an example, from beginning to end of the series, Ah Bao is almost always handsome with a full tone, except for various handsome aesthetic scenes, his family history and fall process are almost all from his self-description, remove those voice-over lines, except for the scene where he went to the 27th to line up to talk about cooperation and the scene where he initially squeezed through the crowd to buy **, it is almost difficult to see what specific events have happened when he is doing foreign trade business or manipulating**.
Reiko and Li Li are similar to Po, they are in a state of bloom from almost the beginning to the end of the series, even if they encounter changes or setbacks, they are all glamorous.
As for Reiko, before she officially parted ways with Po, she was either asking Po for money or buying jewelry in a different way, and after parting ways with Po, Reiko, who disappeared for a while and then returned to Shanghai, suddenly turned into a powerful chef, developed dishes on her own, and reopened her night in Tokyo. As for who she was before she met Po, what kind of story and ability she had, the series did not cover it, which naturally made Reiko who suddenly became a strong woman after leaving Po and then going to Japan for a period of time is not convincing enough. After all, in previous episodes, she was a person who kept her palms up and "calculated" Po.
And Li Li is the same problem, almost all of her stories, shrewdness, methods and talents are explained by narration or dialogue.
Dressed in the coat of the big era and business war, talk about love. All the plots related to the times and business wars in the play are just a few lines or voice-overs, they are just atmospheric devices for the development of the emotional relationship between the male protagonist and several female protagonists.
In fact, aside from the themes of the times and business wars, emotional dramas are more exciting, delicate and moving, but the small pattern of emotional dramas cannot support the general framework of the times and the sinister business. If Wong Kar-wai can edit "Flowers" into an old Shanghai romance movie of less than 2 hours, it will definitely be exciting. However, as a TV series that flaunts the big era and personal struggle, it is too unworthy of its name.
Of course, the above is just a personal impression after watching, and does not mean that it is objective and correct, and different people will have different experiences of watching dramas.
Finally, I have to mention that no matter whether "Flowers" is a good TV series or not, it is a very rare attempt, and it is a rare collision of the main creative teams such as the writer and director, and it has unique value.