A Beautiful Nothing

I cannot describe to you how much I wanted to like this drama. Truly, like, hinged my whole month on it. I remember thinking, after watching Wuliang, that I hoped Edward Guo would direct a whole series someday. Maybe I was wrong.

Espionage and plotting/scheming political stories are my favorite, especially if they're more serious and mature. I don't mind romance, as long as it's not the main plotline and doesn't force itself into the main plotline. It can even add something, done right. So really, this should have been perfect for me.

To preface I should say, I really enjoyed Edward Guo's Wuliang and his Yin Yang Master. However it's my belief that his visuals, while stunning, are often used as a kind of gauzy filler-type decoration for a simple, straightforward plot that doesn't really need actual exposition. By which I mean that he uses beautiful cinematography to tell the substantive "details" of the story but this leaves actual facts and details unclarified in even the vaguest sense and forces the viewers to fill in the gaps with the emotional aftertaste of the offered imagery. If the plot is simple, as in Wuliang, this is fine. If it's more complex it really only works if you're going for that heady mythological fever dream kind of atmosphere, as in Yin Yang Master. A complex warring sects political and espionage drama can't really take this kind of approach. The end result will be too sumptuous without a definable foundation. Like cotton candy wrapped around a sugar framework, it will dissolve on contact with water. Or, in this case, if you try to think about it at all. I like Edward Guo. I just think his style doesn't work with the complex type of story this was meant to be. You'd need a more crisp directing style that focused on relaying facts as concisely as possible.

The idea of a completely insular clan that was heavily structured and full of its own politics was already fascinating. Couple that with an antagonistic sinister enemy clan that was gobbling up the rest of the world one sect at a time and you have the makings of something excellent. Throw in the opening situation of "assassin among the brides" and you've got yourself a good story.

However, right out of the gate the story's logic was taking critical damage. Sinister clan sends an assassin (or two) to their enemy within a group of brides. A fantastic trojan horse strategy. But then they deliberately let slip that an assassin is among the brides. In order to conceal the identity of another assassin among the brides? How does the sinister clan not foresee that their enemy's only logical response to learning that an assassin is among these random ladies is to, at best, refuse them entrance? Thus foiling their own trojan horse plan?

I'm imagining a random Greek sailor walking up to Priam while he examines the giant wooden horse on the shore and saying "there's definitely one Greek guy inside that thing." Number one: like he'd believe there's just one. That's just psychology: if you are told there's one, you'll suspect there are more. If you discover for yourself that there's one, you'll be so satisfied with your own cleverness that you'll believe it was the only one. Thus, I doubt Priam would've cared about angering the gods at that point. Burn it or leave it. No sane person does otherwise. So what sane Greek would tell him there's a soldier in the horse? You're creating a problem you then have to come up with a brilliant plan to fix. But you've now wasted all this time and energy on that brilliant plan, so what about the main plan? Actually managing to plant a spy among the women who are on their way inside the impenetrable compound of their enemy is so, so valuable. And the risk that revealing this strategically creates is so huge that it completely negates the value of their rare opportunity. It makes no logical sense that the Wufeng clan would do it. I could understand sending two instead of one because then even if the Gongs are suspicious and one spy is discovered (by the rogue plotting of the other, perhaps), the core plan is safe. It doesn't make any sense for them to reveal it before the women are even let through the gate. This felt like a weird attempt to outsmart the audience that looped back around and smacked the story in the face. This is such an illogical plan. And the sinister clan's explanation was muddy and unclear. That they had some other motive? Okay, but you still have to get through the door, do you not?

I only watched a few episodes, so really banging on about this issue with logic isn't quite fair. A few efforts were made to "explain" the illogical behavior of certain characters. But this created an atmosphere of wildly unnecessary complexities. A byzantine level of complexity that ends up being so inefficient it cancels itself out. I was expecting to be confused as to people's motives and allegiances. I was disappointed to find that I was more confused by the absurd actions taken by the characters which could only be explained by "this scene would look really cool." And not "oh I wonder what the aim is here, I can't wait to find out." Or something.

Example: the prolonged conversation between the two spy brides that moved in and out of the hanging screen: that should have been amazing. I love those long, tricky conversations where you're hanging on every careful word. But it ended up being actually quite boring. Partly because their analysis of each other's actions didn't quite hold up to that level of scrutiny, by which I mean that the characters were attributing a lot of thought to actions that had not been portrayed carefully enough to withstand even the possibility that something else might've been going on. This partly because the other actress (not Esther Yu) had to carry the scene and didn't have the space, writing, or acting skills to do so. And Esther Yu basically just looked surly and confused the whole time. It takes an enormous amount of subtle skill to pull off those intricate conversation scenes. There were much better versions in the overlooked gem The Ingenious One between the male and female main characters in which more was communicated with the movements of their eyes than every combined line of dialogue between these two spy-brides.

I would allow the naïveté of the male lead. His impulsive insistence on bringing the Trojan horse into the city instead of burning it on the beach was completely believable. His general impulsive dumbness was fine. The way he leapt without looking or thinking was what I would expect.

But his behavior later when he suddenly had all this responsibility was way too diametrically different from who he was initially. He seemed to have become... not MUCH smarter, but so much of his dumbness had vanished, to the point that I was wrenched out of the rhythm of the story. He seemed to be dumb when the story needed him to make mistakes and then to be smart when the story needed him to figure things out.

I get that he's the throwaway son, the drunken playboy, but we were never really shown that at first. In fact, it was a little jarring to see everyone treat him so poorly given that the first time the audience saw him, he was waxing poetic about the snow, behaving with gentility and displaying a tremendous amount of intelligence and foresight. But everyone treated him like an idiot they would cross the street to avoid. We didn't find out till later that he normally behaved like an unlikable loser. Sure, it was explained, but it shouldn't have been necessary. This was poor storytelling. It would have been better to portray the drunken nobody and then gradually reveal the intelligent nobility. As it was, I found his characterization uneven and odd. Later, when he was shoved into a position of power, the self-doubt and hiding-away attitude seemed to vanish. Perhaps if I'd watched more I would have seen more about it. But gaining power shouldn't have made his doubts and fears disappear or even just diminish, it should have made them larger. It was hard to care about him because things that should have been clearly understood were unnecessarily muddy and uncertain.

His acting was fine. I feel that he would've done good work if the writing of his character had been properly mapped. I really like that type of character. The failure who has unwanted power thrust upon him and has to somehow grow into it before he loses everything. That's why I tried to watch this. But they jumbled his development in those crucial early episodes, so I didn't really trust them to get any of the rest of it right.

I don't particularly like Esther Yu when she's acting seriously. If I'm being honest, this was a bit of a problem for me with Love Between Fairy and Devil. I found her serious, darker acting to be stiff, overwrought, and unwatchable. She was the same here in the three episodes I watched. Her other bride-agent counterpart was portrayed with more nuance and more agility, in my opinion, and even she left much to be desired. (I can't help but be reminded of the restrained complexity of Angelababy in Wind Blows From Longxi who did more with her stone smile and stiff eyebrows than both of these actresses combined, and with less screen time in the entire series than these two actresses in the first handful of episodes) Esther Yu wasn't inscrutable, she was a block of wood. She was beautiful and elegant and moved through fight choreography like a dancer, but even though her character was written extremely layered and complicated, her portrayal flattened it like an 80s perm in high humidity.

Not to mention that she's a woman who was supposedly trained for years to infiltrate, deceive, etc. and in one of the most critical moments immediately begins acting in a way that makes her stand out? If I'm to believe that this woman is an even somewhat competent spy then she should be going out of her way to behave in a way that makes her disappear in the crowd of brides. She needs to do what they do, be frightened when they're frightened, angry when they're angry. Her training should have made her allergic to standing out. Blending in should be second nature to her. It's her whole point. She would be trained to read people. She would have immediately picked up on the younger brother's sympathetic desire to save the women, spy and all, and played into it. Instead of randomly launching her own half-assed escape attempt? From one of the most heavily fortified mountains in the world? And the speculation that she did this to stand out deliberately doesn't hold water because her specific behavior didn't say "delicate bride in need of saving," it screamed "sneaky enemy agent."

The badass female spy is a nifty idea in the twenty-first century I guess. But in any society in any time the best spy isn't the best fighter. They aren't the prettiest, handsomest, tallest, strongest, etc. They are the ones that no one sees. The ones you forget after you talk to them. A female assassin who can't rely on guns and is necessarily going to be smaller and less strong than most of her targets would probably be heavily trained in poisons, which I guess they did get mostly right. And if you just want to write a story with a cool badass female fighter, that's great. But to be believable she has to have spent at least as much time learning tea ceremonies and the zither and how to invisibly guide conversations as she did learning how to elbow people in the teeth. And I mean years, not days. Walking in a circle for a week and a half with her hands held just so is not enough to learn how to blend in as a noblewoman. It just isn't. Pretending it is does a disservice to the female spy, the female noblewoman, the integrity of the story and the intelligence of the audience. And if I'm being completely honest, it's unlikely a man would be able to teach her even a quarter of what she'd need to know to pass as a noblewoman. But that's okay, see, because he at least covered what she'd need in the bedroom. Which is all a woman really needs to know, right? What are we doing here, Edward?

Which doesn't even make sense, honestly, because while a noblewoman would know about the birds and bees, in those days a typical noblewoman wouldn't have a comprehensive working knowledge of "erotica" unless she was in the trade. And if she did that would be suspicious. Either because it would call into question her reputation or her entire identity. Did nobody in the writing room have their coffee for this one or what?

I'm reminded of the scene in The Secret of the Three Kingdoms when the emperor thinks he knows how to eat grapes until the empress shows him how the wealthy do so and he realizes that this might have given him away.

I'm reminded of Maggie Q's Nikita series in which that one teacher would train the girls exclusively in ways to disarm men with their mere company, how they carried themselves, what color their clothes were, etc. This training took years and years.

I'm reminded of the completely overblown and kind of ridiculous scene in Inglorious Basterds which nevertheless had the right idea. You know the one I mean, when he asked for three drinks the wrong way and then everyone died.

Furthermore, presumably all these women were from martial clans which is why, I'm assuming, no one was too suspicious when Esther Yu's character could hold her own in a fight with the young Gong princeling. But if they were so capable of fighting, why didn't they attempt any such fighting when their lives were in danger? Either they could fight or they couldn't. But again it seemed that the plot choices were made based on what would look best on the screen. And that elegant fight on the riverbank was lovely, but made no sense to me. And if they all could fight on that level I feel like more precautions would have been taken? Especially if such skills were so expected as to be unsurprising.

If I were the Wufeng clan, I'd have a spy stationed in the brothel the younger brother frequents. If she could become his go-to, I'd have an invaluable source of information about the interior of the compound. I would know when there was tension within the main family by the mood of the younger brother, I'd be able to glean details about the politics of the whole clan based on little specifics that he'd let slip without even realizing it. In that sense, the youngest brother would be the one the Wufeng clan would know the most about as he was by far the easiest to access for information. Because most men, even good and noble men, of that type of society would naturally let their guard down around serving women. That's not as stylish or cool as the slick, trained ninja assassin, but it makes more sense and is therefore more fun to watch. For me at least. For all I know, if I kept watching I might find out that they do have a spy there. But I doubt our man Edward had time to think of that what with all prolonged sequences of young, shirtless, sweaty men sparring and the slow motion mud pit fights...

Maybe I'm not the target audience here. I don't mind when a guy is shirtless in a way that makes narrative sense or when a women has to strip to change her clothes or something. But I am not a fan of deliberate, excessive, full-eye contact physical objectification of either gender. Like that long sequence introducing the King in The Forbidden Marriage. It was like an early 00's music video the way they slowly panned over closeup shots of his bare body in candlelight. Compare that to the scene in Lovers of the Red Sky when he was working out shirtless. That made narrative sense, we were being shown his surprising physical power and fighting ability which came into play shortly thereafter. If you insist on putting a person's body on display for your personal enjoyment, at least make sure the plot benefits, for god's sake.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not going to stand on some soapbox and shout about the poor treatment of women in a random ancient society. I know what I'm getting into when I fire up an historical drama. It's fine, it's a story, let's all calm down. However, why are we having literal mud wrestling for no narrative purpose whatsoever? This is the problem with this drama. A great story could have been put here but all the narrative space was filled with meaningless visuals like an artistic slow motion sequence of women trainees in the period equivalent of underwear fighting in a mud pit while their male handlers looked on. I mean, Edward, what's the aim here?

The atmosphere was dark and moody and gothic, the cinematography was unbelievably gorgeous, the costumes were stunning, and everyone was very beautiful, if that kind of thing is important to you. And there were some undeniably cool scenes (that guy going up the stairs on horseback gets the 2023 award for Best Entrance). But all of that was so heavily weighted in production that the story, which is hidden behind all those smoke and mirrors, is full of holes, built on flimsy framework, and barely withstands any close examination before collapsing in on itself. Which is a shame, because a good story paired with the stunning production design would have made this an actual masterpiece.

Maybe it would improve if I continued. But I doubt it. And I don't trust it enough at this point to waste my time.

I will say: the actual instrumental background soundtrack was SO good. I desperately need to find that.

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