azdak | Nirvana in Fire. Still.

I'm still splashing around in the shallow end of Asian dramas but my current viewing, "The Story of Minglan" (which I'm enjoying, don't get me wrong) has brought the two outstanding features of "Nirvana in Fire" into very sharp focus. One is Hu Ge's phenomenal performance as Mei Changsu - it's not that there aren't stellar performances among the remaining cast, because there most definitely are, but Mei Changsu is the role with which the whole series stands and falls, and Hu Ge provides one of those once-in-a-generation meldings of actor and role that makes every single scene he's in riveting to watch and raises the game of everyone around him. The other aspect is the plotting. When your protagonist is a strategic genius who spends 12 years preparing his schemes and 53 out of 54 episodes executing them, they need to be good, but Mei Changsu's schemes are on another level altogether. It's like watching a 53 episode version of Fischli and Weiss's The Way Things Go transformed into drama, as click by click the cogwheels interlock and the dominoes fall over, in a combination of meticulously-laid groundwork, brilliant extemporisation, and, when all else fails, a truly impressive talent for trolling. And at another level, the story itself is as brilliantly plotted as any of Mei Changsu's schemes, intricate threads woven with such expertise that even the tiniest details are tied into the main narrative until you suddenly recognise the pattern episodes later. Yes, it has the odd painful lapse (but then even "The Lord of the Rings" has Tom Bombadil, koff koff), and there are some Chinese genre elements that play weirdly to Western audiences, but my God, it's so intricate and far-ranging and convincing, and it means that the emotional beats, when they come, are truly, madly, deeply earned. Don't come to me with your oaths of fealty, people, unless you can overlay them with at least three layers of sub-text, three decades of back story and multiple episodes of character interaction.

Nirvana in Fire. Still.

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