Man chang de ji jie

This TV show triggered self-compassion for my own midlife crisis.

Yes, you may not encounter the sad life in this series, but you will definitely get older. Even the most powerful people will get old, and when that time comes, how to live decently?

It does suck to have your wife and children die abnormally and your best friend die in a car accident like Wang Xiang in this title, but it's even worse to face your own old age. The good thing is that the screenwriter gives a more positive and optimistic attitude, which seems to encourage us viewers not to be afraid of getting old. But specifically for each individual, it may not always be that easy.

Frankly, I've started to have to face some of the signs of aging, my mind gets older sometimes, and trying to act young seems to make me cringe because appearances can't hide it.

Let's hope I get the same optimistic ending, like the ending line: look forward, don't look back!

Snapping my fingers once in a while, shattering the distance between the distant past and reality.

Every dust of the times falls on a person as a mountain.

I didn't really understand this sentence until I watched this TV series. This masterpiece, which I think is the best Chinese TV series I have seen, tells an absolute tragedy. A lost father, a frustrated husband and a retired policeman attempted to solve a mystery which had lasted for nearly 20 years. They were all trapped in the autumn in 1998. All the roles in it tried to fight against their fates, but found in vain eventually. When the mystery is solved, fate still remains in the Man chang de ji jie, which means a long season in English. This sense of powerlessness makes each of us relate it to ourselves.

I know many people like watching a nobody finally turn to a successful man through his hard-working and insistence. But most of the time it's not the reality. And most of us, the ordinary people, can't overcome this mountain of the times. We are trapped in this long autumn, until our faiths break down. However, we still see someone go forward.

Life is difficult. Sometimes it's like a elegy of fate. But never forget to sing a hymn to ordinary people. In the end of the series, a snow falls, declaring the approaching of winter. What a beautiful scene! We all like spring because it's the beginning of a new year, also the beginning of life. But not everyone is so fortunate to see it. So when the long autumn finally ends, when the first winter snow falls, why can't it be a new beginning for us? Eyes towards front, move forward, and do not look back. Sometimes the meaning of life is not break through our fates, but choose hope in the suffering of life.

We can all find ourselves in this TV series. It's more like a documentary about ordinary people, and also inspires them to move forward.

For those of you reading this epitaph, we don't know at this point that this is the whispering train whistling through the Möbius Ring rising and sinking after generations of crushing Then let's give a resonant ring. If there is no echo, the season will continue to be long, but be sure to turn back before moving forward.

I admire and marvel at the director's ability for pacing, and his artistic standards are amazingly high. I love his camera angles and techniques, and I love the soundtrack in this drama. The plot is well thought out and interesting in many places. The natural human condition of the Chinese people is captured with ease. And, of course, it's all thanks to the superbly cast actors and actresses. Except for Shen Mo, whose acting sometimes lacks an explosive power and seems a bit stilted compared to the rest of the cast.

Why is this season so long? Maybe this is the season of life.

... about ordinary lives of ordinary people, which, due to its amazing details and filmography explains a lot, not only about China, but about the ex-USSR and the Eastern Europe.

This is the first humane look, without the hand-wringing so common among the Eastern European "independent" film-makers, at what and how the transformation of the 90ies really happened and what it meant (not much, either good or bad) for the ordinary people.

Overall, this is an excellent multi-decade multi-character character study, which, I am sure will be included in movie schools and anthropology curriculas for decades to come.

10/10.

An extraordinary production.

If it was a mainstream British series, this would win a shedful of BAFTAs.

If American, it would be up for Emmy's galore.

If Scandanavian, well, it would win pretty much everything they award in Scandanavian if they have awards.

The Oscars obviously are for movies and this is tv series but if they awarded Oscars for tv then best actor co-winners go to the pair that played Mr. Wang and Captain Ma and that's guaranteed. The actor playing Ma's performance in the last 30 minutes or so in the final episode worthy of an award just for that aspect (not saying anything more on that as it would spoil the reveal).

I don't know if they do awards in China but I expect it swept the awards there if there are any.

There's no doubt it can be confusing at times. There are three time lines to follow. The last one is 2016 when three of the major characters from the earlier times are still involved and following up something that happened in 1998 and how it relates to an incident unfolding in 2016. The first time line is 1997 in which we see the lead up to the critical events of 1998 and characters are introduced before their lives fall apart. Then we have 1998 when the key events happen. Jumping back and forth between 1997 and 1998 can be especially confusing as obviously the characters look the same; by 2016, they have aged so you know when you are seeing the modern timeline.

Towards the end of the series, time line 1997 has progressed in leaps and bounds over the many weeks and months and eventually catches up to 1998 when everything comes together and you discover what it was all about as you watched 1998 unfold in the earlier episodes. It all starts to become clear as you put the pieces of the puzzle together.

Finally in the later episodes, what is going on in 2016 also starts to make sense as our trio of older men discover more about the earlier events and more is revealed.

Again, it all eventually starts to tie together.

There is much jumping back and forth between the time lines from episode to episode so that keeps the brain active trying to keep up and remember what happened the last time you saw what was going on in that year. That can be an issue. There are even episodes when a timeline is not shown at all and only picked up in the following episode so you immediately are trying to remember what happened last time you were there in the story.

This is not a series where you can watch one episode and then set it aside and pick it up a week later. You really need to concentrate and remember episode to episode what is going on. I'd suggest 12 consecutive evenings of viewing while setting the rest of your regular programming aside for the duration. Even better, two episodes in one evening as some of the episodes are well under an hour.

One negative was that in the version we watched the English subtitles sometimes didn't stay on the screen long enough. You could get 3/4 of the way through what was on screen and then they moved on to the next sentence so you miss potentially important words. Not always, but annoying when it happened. This was especially true in the first episode (or two) but seemed to improve as the series went on. Didn't help that the Chinese speakers were rapid fire when emotions ran high so the subtitles probably were struggling to keep up. Not the fault of the series ; no doubt it would have been better to speak Chinese to follow everything properly.

There are numerous loose plot threads everywhere as you watch the series (and that's the point) and you do wonder how it all will be tied back up by the end but, amazingly, after finishing it last night and thinking about it this morning, I can honestly say it all warpped up perfectly as far as we could tell. There weren't any of those , "hang on! What about ... That doesn't make sense" moments that are so common these days in so many series.

Would a Western remake of this series work? I wonder. Much of this is about China and the China of the 1990s when the economy was undergoing such rapid change. The coal mines of the UK as they shut down might be one setting if a British remake. The closure of steel mills in the USA possibly? Just throwing out ideas.

Anyway, watch this series.

Magnificent.