I'm truly impressed with Zhang Meng's brilliant performance in this clip - Yong En's refined breeding and quiet dignity, her pleading eyes, her restrained frustration, her silent despair, her heightened emotion, her 情不自禁 uncontrollable desire to hold him tight and be held by him, and her controlled rage. Bravo!
~~PATHOS~~
accusatory eyes - pain internalized
despondent eyes - resigned
Hope against hope!
Nuances - her fingers instinctively reach out to his..hoping..willing him..!
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Wearing her heart on her sleeve.
Heart over mind. Emotions trumps intellect. Hope raised, hope dashed.
Last hope - you've got to remember our pinkie swear! Please!
Mortified, broken, her unshed tears finally fall.
Distress, shame, trepidation,
Whoever this man is, he's not Lai Fu!
His sinister gentleness is all that more frightening!
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I have quite a different perspective instead.
ReplyDeleteBasically, the script or the story did not build up in a way that convinced me there was a strong love exists between Lai Fu and Yong En. It is more like sweet puppy love to me in fact. So much so that when Lai Fu died, I didn’t feel sad for YE.
With this weak connection/foundation of love I see in both of them, YE did not manage to make me walk into her character to experience how she should feel when she saw Ting Xuan. YE could not make me visualise her inner feelings during the time she stayed under the same roof with TX. As such, I feel so bad to say that actually, I could not go along with her sentiments with TX in the scenes of this episode. I could not feel her pain her disappointment..
In their complex relationship I only feel sad for TX, poor TX being dragged into her world for no reason and subsequently got rejected. Well, this is how the ending of the script was written, so no further comments. But what was true is that the weak binding between YE and LF has affected my subsequent reading of YE's emotions and reactions.
I think probably I am the only one who felt that ...
Haha, to each her own. At the time of their encounter, Yong En was in a very bad place, love-starved and drowning in negative emotional cesspool. Her physical and emotional situation in shambles. Lai Fu, with his adoring, unconditional love, was a emotion lifesaver/a crutch to her, dragging her ashore and giving her the much needed hope and emotional stability and love to her, so I don't doubt Yong En's love for Lai Fu. (be it deep mature love or shallow puppy love or just gratitude love.) It's Yong En's first time ever experiencing love in any form in her life - Lai Fu's love is all that more poignant and intense as it was also her first romantic love) . When Lai Fu disappears, the imaginary lifesaver disappears too plunging Yong En once again into that cesspool of negative emotions, and have her feeling the sense of betrayal all over again. Her short-lived period of stability and hope greatly intensified and magnified her sense of devastation. That being said, the love relationships of Qi Jun's love for Yong En, Yong En's love for Lai Fu and later for Qi Jun, and Ting Xuan's love for Yong En are all dealt with in a very juvenile and shallow in a Harlequin juvenile style. Definitely only watch YYP for Steven's performance and not be bogged down by the storyline.
DeleteBut what I find unbelievable is that knowing Lai Fu so intimately, how can she mistaken Ting Xuan to be Lai Fu? They may look alike physically but in all other aspects they are so different.
Although I can't feel for YE, I must say I like these scenes, too because of Steven's subtle and refined acting here. He overshadowed the flaws :D
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