Zhao Liying plays the heroine Gao Yuexiang in the movie "Sunny Flower"

  After the release of the movie "Sunshine Flower" directed by Feng Xiaogang, there is a trend of polarization around its theme. Some viewers believe that this movie truly reproduces the survival difficulties and self-improvement of women at the bottom, as well as the employment discrimination, economic pressure and social prejudice faced by veterans; some comments believe that the movie is a stereotyped narrative for the hardships of women at the bottom, and there is a suspicion of consumer suffering.

  This bipolar evaluation may be because the film does not handle the symbiosis and balance between drama and authenticity. This involves the dialectical relationship between realism and drama, and is also one of the highly controversial core propositions in literature and art theory.

  "Xiangyang·Flower" is adapted from a short story in Chong'an's "The Past of Education Reform" "Xiangyang Flowers in Women's Prison Bloom Outside the Wall", which tells the story of women with a criminal record who struggled hard after returning to society. The original story and theme have natural adaptation advantages, which gives the film a lot of room to play in many aspects of human nature, emotion, and social reality. The film adds a large number of plots to make the entire story more complete on the original character and story framework.

  However, compared with the original work and the adaptation, we can easily identify what is a real and complex good plot, and what is a fake and stereotyped mediocre plot. Director Feng Xiaogang said in an interview that this is a warm realist film, but from the perspective of adaptation strategy, he obviously prefers to create a genre film with realistic themes. It is this volatile creative attitude and adaptation idea that destroys the authenticity and complexity of the original story.

  Dynamic tension between realism and genre

  Realist films and realistic films are two different narrative strategies, with essential differences in creative concepts, aesthetic demands and social functions. At the narrative level, this difference is reflected in loose causal chains/strong causal relationships, diffuse conflicts/single conflicts, open dilemmas/supposed resolutions, etc. The deep contradiction between the two in aesthetic demands is a confrontation between authenticity and drama.

  In current film creation, the two often show a trend of cross-fusion. Commercial films with realistic themes often require the plot structure and dramatic intensity of genre movies, and also hope to complete in-depth thinking about society with the help of the realistic aesthetic spirit.

  But this fusion involves the inherent contradiction of realism as an art form—objective and subjective, real and fiction. Jameson believes that the essential contradiction of realism stems from the irreconcilability of its cognitive and aesthetic nature. On the one hand, realism pursues the objective reproduction of social reality (cognitive function), and on the other hand, it must be subjectively processed (aesthetic function) through artistic forms. This duality leads to realism always being in the paradox of "requiring both truth and fiction".

  Contemporary narrative practice has actually solved this internal contradiction of realism in a sense, and also broke through the simple opposition between "realism and drama". The two can have both tension and mutual achievement. Because realism also needs to develop more complex dramatic grammar, and use dramaticity to complete the observation and anatomy of society. For example, "I Am Not a God of Medicine" and "Parasite" both use genre methods to enter social reality and capture social hot spots, achieving a paradigm breakthrough in realistic-themed films, which is a model of integration.

  The key is that the real-life movies need to achieve mutual achievement of authenticity and drama, otherwise the contradiction between the two will easily create a huge crack between the subject matter and form. Reality itself is very dramatic, but we need to be wary of false dramatic conflicts that are separated from social texture.

  Drama is a tool for dissecting reality or a miracle that is separated from society

  In commercial films, drama without realistic basis will inevitably degenerate into cheap narrative tools. A good dramatic plot must not only conform to the logic of real life, but also be able to express the diversity of social reality and the complexity of human nature. Deepening the creation of themes and characters will help to augment the effect of reality.

  In "Xingyang·Hua", the protagonists Gao Yuexiang and Heimei tried various jobs, and were fired for having a criminal record. The adaptation adds a plot: the two were deducted by the wretched boss while dancing and selling wine. Gao Yuexiang wanted to get her salary back, but was almost sexually assaulted by her boss. In the end, the two were beaten to pieces. Then there is a wonderful plot in the original work: they put on the fake police uniform they bought and took the risk to go to their former inmate Hu Ping’s house to cheat money. When they saw Hu Ping’s grandparents’ family being barely ill and their grandmother was still ill in bed, they felt unbearable, so they paid 500 yuan to give it to their inmate’s grandmother. Comparing the two plots of "Dancing Sales-Attempted to Be Sexual Assault" and "Scam Money-Send Money", we will see the difference immediately. These two dramatic plots are all designed to express the protagonist's survival dilemma, but there are quite a gap in presenting social reality, shaping characters, and revealing human nature.

  The three-dimensionality and complexity of the plot of "scam money and send money" is reflected in many aspects. The protagonist's contradictory behavior not only reveals their survival difficulties, as well as the evil and moral flaws of human nature that arise, but also shows the human warmth and kindness that the lower-level groups still retain in desperate situations, creating a complex image of "imperfect but credible". The act of giving money is not only to help others, but also to save yourself. Through independent choices, characters also complete the transformation from a "survivor" who follows the survival instinct to an "awakener" who grows internally. Among them, we can see social structural problems such as the difficulty of reemployment and intergenerational transmission of poverty for released prisoners, and we can also see the personal initiative power contained in mutual assistance between the weak, and use the glimmer of human nature in difficulties to reflect the theme of the film "Born towards the Sun".

  In contrast, sales humiliation is a stereotyped and outdated plot that contains the wonder of sexual violence. Even though it truly reflects social phenomena such as workplace exploitation and gender violence, it is a superficial revelation. Sexual violence scenes only stay at the level of displaying violent conflicts, taking "attempted violation" as the climax of dramatic conflicts, creating tension through visual impact, but lacking in-depth portrayal of the psychological trauma of female victims, it is also weakly related to the main plot, almost "conflict for conflict", so it becomes a background board for women's suffering, with some suspicion of spectacle.

  The identity of the "victim" of the protagonist who was deducted from wages and attempted to be violated is constantly strengthened. What the audience sees is the superposition of suffering, rather than the growth of the character's personality, and the character becomes a "symbol of suffering." At the same time, this setting simplifies the general social prejudice against criminals into individual harm by an evil person, turning the complex structural dilemma into a relatively simple opposition between good and evil.

  Whether it is realist films or real-life movies, drama is a catalyst - excessive amounts distort the essence of reality, and moderate amounts activate cognitive potential and emotional power. The truly effective criterion of judgment lies in whether these plots can trigger multiple contradictions in reality through dramaticity. The reason why these highly dramatic scenes are established is that they achieve a more essential reality than reality in fiction.

  Is authenticity a mechanical copy of reality or a thinking about the essence of society

  Dramatic events in real life are naturally present, but when they are transplanted into works of art, they often need to undergo a transformation of artistic authenticity. Whether a dramatic plot is powerful enough is only the first step. The legitimacy of drama does not lie in its "reality" itself, but in whether it can become an aesthetic carrier of a specific social cognitive logic. The core of realism is not a mechanical copy of reality, but a revealing of the essence of society through artistic processing. To judge whether the drama of a fictional work is reasonable is essentially testing whether the creator has made a leap from the truth of life to the truth of art.

  In order to show the protagonist's difficult situation, the movie adds several similar dramatic plots in the adaptation: Black girl's money was snatched by security guards, Gao Yuexiang was wrongly humiliated as a waiter, and the two were sexually harassed and violently injured as a salesperson. These seemingly real plots are mechanically stacked together, almost without exception, simplified and stereotyped, becoming the background boards for the suffering of the characters, and losing the narrative potential originally contained in these plots.

  The adaptation also adds some functional plots with clear directions. For example, Gao Yuexiang was added to marry a cripple husband in exchange for marriage for her younger brother, and her daughter was deaf and mute and wanted a cochlear implant, and her daughter was abandoned to a welfare home. These plot settings have a certain realistic basis, rationalize the characters' motivations at the narrative level, explicitize gender issues at the thematic level, and transform individual tragedies into gender dilemma, so there is rationality and progressiveness of adaptation. However, when multiple tragedies are superimposed on a character, when suffering is just piled up but lacks rich details and character psychology, suffering is to some extent landscaped and becomes an exploitative sensational tool.

  The climax of the film is that Gao Yuexiang enters the thief's nest alone to save Hei Mei. After that, Hei Mei's hand was smashed and Yuexiang hits her father's head. They are all adapted and added. In the original work, the police eliminated the thief's nest. In contrast, in the movie, prison guard Deng Hong introduced them to the job of unlocking and selling locks. In the original work, they found the job of selling locks by themselves. These two adaptations interchange the role of police and also reflect the creators' adaptation tendency.

  In the original work, the police are the executors of "institutional justice" - to eliminate crimes, while the women at the bottom are the practitioners of "self-awakening" - to make a living by themselves, forming a balanced narrative of "institutional guarantee + individual struggle". In the movie adaptation, the police changed from "law enforcers" to "saviors" who provide work, and the women at the bottom changed from "awakened ones" to "saved objects" who rely on institutional resources. This exchange essentially transforms the "structural issue" of social discrimination against criminals into "individual moral redemption." This adaptation is effective at the dramatic level, creating more intensive dramatic conflicts and emotional shocks by strengthening women's violent resistance, which is in line with the logic of commercial genre films. But from the perspective of artistic value and social value, this adaptation also has some problem: placing social problems solutions on individual morality, eliminating the subjectivity and initiative of survival at the bottom, and shaping them into passive groups waiting to be saved. To some extent, this adaptation replaces the authenticity with drama, amplifying the possible sense of separation when combining realistic themes with genre films.

  The values ​​of the film creator will influence the way he captures reality. In past film and television works, the group of released prisoners has been in a blind spot of obscured narrative for a long time. "Xiangyang·Flower" chooses to deeply observe their survival difficulties and spiritual rebirth. The topic selection perspective itself has breakthrough social significance, and it can also see the creators' efforts and social responsibility to present the dilemma of women at the bottom. However, in the process of conception and adaptation, the creators sometimes use dramatic plots to dilute the realistic texture of the film for the sake of storyline and viewing, which is somewhat of a pity. How to show extreme situations and complex human nature through effective and reasonable dramatic plots, reveal the reality that is obscured by daily life, and enable movies to reflect or reflect different aspects of the unconsciousness of society, has become a topic that creators must face.

  (The author is a doctorate in film and a postdoctoral fellow in communication, and an associate researcher at the China Federation of Literary and Art Circles Film Art Center)

[Editor in charge: Susan]