That sounded better in Mandarin: Deepanjana Pal writes on The Drama vs a C-drama

The two stars play Emma and Charlie, a young couple whose rather-perfect relationship is upended when Emma shares a dark secret during an alcohol-drenched dinner with friends.

The Drama ticks all the boxes for an A24 production. It looks gorgeous and has a buzz-generating cast (Alana Haim is brilliant as the maid-of-honour from hell). The editing is sharp and the sound design, inventive. Yet, while the film is enjoyable and raises intriguing questions for the audience to ponder, it stumbles in one key area: Zendaya and Pattinson, though individually convincing, have barely any chemistry.

The Drama ends up lacking the scarring intensity of Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966). Emma and Charlie don’t get under one another’s skin as Oscar Isaac and Jessica Chastain do, in the riveting series Scenes from a Marriage (2021). We don’t itch to separate them when they circle towards each other, or yearn for them to come together when they are driven apart.

Instead, The Drama leans heavily on Zendaya and Pattinson’s fame to draw audiences in.

By contrast, and in the very different world of commercial television in China, director Zeng Qingjie relies on all the trappings of fiction to do the heavy lifting in his latest show, Pursuit of Jade. It has become to C-dramas what Crash Landing on You (2019) was to the genre’s Korean counterpart: a viral hit beyond borders, that even non-fans of the industry have heard of.

Pursuit of Jade is Chinese TV’s first truly global hit.

It is an idol drama, which traditionally implies style over substance. One generally follows such a show not for authenticity but for eye candy and romance. Zeng delivers both, with two swoon-worthy leads made for the feminine gaze; but he also delivers more.

Zhang Linghe plays the haughty marquis Xie Zheng, who meets his match in Tian Xiwei’s irrepressible Changyu, a young woman who becomes a butcher to support herself and her young sister after they are orphaned.

The show, a period drama set in the fictional Dayin Dynasty, is at its best in its first half, but even as it unravels, it is held together by the relationship at its core.

Changyu has a rich history of military achievements (the character is modelled on Qin Liangyu, a female general from the Ming Dynasty era). Though strong women are a regular feature of C-dramas, Changyu stands out for how macho she is. Meanwhile, for much of the show, Zheng is a warrior recovering from injuries. He becomes the yin to Changyu’s yang, but the unusual swapping of gender roles does not diminish his appeal. If anything, the setup makes his heroic flourishes all the more impactful.

Zeng is a seasoned director of C-dramas and knows how to orchestrate on-screen chemistry. For instance, he elevates the fake-marriage trope by including a scene on Zheng and Changyu’s wedding night in which shadow play (a running motif in the show) is used to create a heady cocktail of illusion, soft intimacy and comedy. Much of the success of the show can, in fact, be traced to Zeng’s clever direction.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to write some Drama-Pursuit of Jade fan fiction in which Changyu time-travels to 2026, casually carrying Zheng on her back, to remind Emma that she can, and should, do better.

(Write to Deepanjana Pal @dpanjana on Instagram. The views expressed are personal)