Life Is A Long Quiet River #心居 - short review

#TongYao #童瑶 #HaiQing #海清 #ZhangSongwen #张颂文 #FengShaofeng #冯绍峰 #JieBing #节冰 #SunAnke #孙安可 #DongQing #董晴 #LuSiyu #陆思宇 #TengHuatao #滕华涛

A SHORT SPOILER FREE REVIEW

Life is a Long Quiet River is a contemporary series set in Shanghai in the Autumn of 2017. The series is centred around two protagonists played superbly by Tong Yao and Hai Qing, They play a pair of sisters-in-law who are superficially cordial but who actually dislike and mistrust each other privately.

Tong Yao plays Gu Qingyu, a very successful executive in a multinational investment bank. She owns her own apartment and pretty much everything she wears is from luxury brands like Giorgio Armani, Dior, Chanel etc just to name a few and she looks effortlessly elegant in them. (Aside: Tong Yao looks stunning in this series.) She's independent, forthright, practical and rational but can also be dispassionate, acerbic and sarcastic.

Hai Qing plays Feng Xiaoqin who is a full-time housewife and relies on Gu Lei, her husband, for the household expenses. She is emotional, short-tempered, abrasive, aggressive and very blunt. However, she is also caring and attentive to the needs of others. Her little nuclear family lives in the Gu family home with Gu Shihong and Grandma Gu. Her younger sister Feng Qianqian also lives with them. It's also clear from the opening sequence that after eight years, everyone has already taken her for granted and she's become really frustrated by it.

Feng Xiaoqin has lived in Shanghai for over 8 years but she feels like she doesn't truly belong. She feels that in order to gain dignity, respect and acceptance, she will need to get an apartment of her own. So she hatches a series of plans in order to get an apartment that she has an eye on but that both Gu Lei and her can ill afford. When we first meet her, she is busy trying to get Gu Lei to borrow money from his much wealthier sister. However, Gu Qingyu turns him down, saying that coincidentally, she too wants to buy another apartment. Gu Qingyu can afford to lend them this money, however, she doesn't trust Feng Xiaoqin enough to lend it to her. Undeterred, Feng Xiaoqin will hatch more plans to try and get the money to pay for the deposit of the apartment. This will create conflict in the family, in particular between Gu Qingyu and Feng Xiaoqin which in turn will result in a tragic event which will drive the two of them further apart.

This series sets itself up to be a family melodrama by pitting the two very different sister-in-laws against each other. However, as the series progresses, viewers will quickly realize that it’s really not a melodrama at all. The series has an unhurried pace and no sensationalistic moments or events. While there is conflict in the series, conflict is more a byproduct of the messiness of human relationships and familial bonds. In order to achieve minimal melodramatic conflict, the dual protagonists have timelines that are mostly parallel and only intertwined via family dinners, events or visits, and via their mutual friend Zhan Xiang (played by Zhang Songwen).

In order to keep the viewers engaged, one of the interesting things that this drama did was to constantly create situations and events that lead viewers to expect certain outcomes based on their past experiences with other dramas but then eventually subvert those expectations. It constantly keeps the viewers wondering if the series will give viewers their expected payload.

In so doing, the series needed their cast to be very good. LLQR doesn't have big dramatic moments or a big villain to hate. Instead, it has very flawed characters, a pretty realistic way of telling its story and two protagonists whose paths don’t cross as often as viewers expected. So in order for viewers to remain engaged, the cast had to ensure that they helped to create characters that the viewers would care about, root for or at the very least have an emotional reaction to. This cast was more than up to the task and all the main cast members and the more important support cast members like Sun Anke, Dong Qing, Lu Siyu to name a few, were excellent. The four main cast members, Hai Qing, Tong Yao, Zhang Songwen and Feng Shaofeng also had a lot of chemistry too which made all their scenes together quite delightful to watch.

This series isn’t for everyone though. Its uncommon narrative structure, pace, intended ambiguity in the script and an insistence on not judging its characters is bound to frustrate some viewers. However, for viewers who are more open to different ways of storytelling, you might enjoy this beautifully performed slice of life story about each individual's journey of self-discovery, and the complexity of humans, human relationships, familial ties and the human experience.

Appendix:

Since I write these reviews as part of my plan to watch as many things as Tong Yao has ever worked on in her life, I’ll just touch slightly on Tong Yao and her Gu Qingyu. I really like Gu Qingyu. She was my favourite character in the series because she was the most complex of all the characters and the hardest to read. Many things about her have to be gleaned from the script which made her the most enigmatic of all the characters.

Also, Gu Qingyu was a mixture of many contradictions. She could be imperious yet yielding, bold yet demure, serious yet impish, mature yet child-like, perceptive yet self-deluded, rational yet impulsive, pragmatic yet romantic, blunt yet diplomatic, suspicious yet trusting, mean yet kind and strong yet vulnerable. Not everyone in the series got to see all the facets to her personality, yet somehow these contradictions do not feel compartmentalize.  All these contradictions were able to blend together to give us a very believable, fully realised human being. This credit has to go to Tong Yao for making it work.  She balanced all of these contradictions very well and never overplayed any of it.  It was always just enough.

I have also almost finished writing a longer commentary on this series that expands on several points in this short review. When that is ready, I will amend this section and post the link here. I might still write one more post about this series. If I do, that post will centre mostly on Gu Qingyu. However, given my track record on getting some of these posts finished, don’t count on it to be anytime soon. 😅

(For links to interviews & other reviews of Tong Yao's work, please CLICK ME)