Artful but Predictable

I knew going in that watching the c-drama age gap romance The Forbidden Flower was probably going to disappoint me. It did, and exactly in the way I expected it would, but for the first 23 episodes I was startled, impressed and somewhat addicted.

The premise: young artist He Ran (Xu Ruo Han) meets Xiao Han (Jerry Yan) in a beauty shop; he washes her hair for her and she supposedly falls for him just from the sound of his voice. Basically the set up here is that she's 20 and wealthy, and he's 40 and impoverished. I'd say the age gap is about the same for the actors in real life, but Jerry Yan is very attractive for a middle-aged guy, so you're willing to go along with this. He Ran decides on the basis of that one encounter to pursue Xiao Han, which she does. Only she has leukemia (in remission), and he's apparently had a very troubled past with women (never exactly detailed.)

There are a lot of other players in this drama. Subplots abound, too, including He Ran's troubled mother and her secret office romance with a guy twenty years her junior; a childhood friend who loves He Ran to distraction and provides most of the comic relief; a wealthy uncle or friend who mysteriously steps in now and then to avert disaster, etc. Some of the subplots were distracting, others worked well with the main romance. I absolutely hated He Ran's mom in the beginning, and then fell in love with her by the end of the series. That's pretty hard to pull off, so I'll give that a gold star.

The series is pretty wild for a Chinese drama, which are regularly and strictly censored by the state. This one somehow escaped that and had plenty of (for China, anyway) steamy kissing scenes between the main and the secondary characters. The central romance seems predictable, and then goes crazy, and then goes crazy again. There are some cultural aspects that might not translate well for the west, but I understood them, in particular some of the weird-to-us things He Ran does toward the end.

Visually the series is stunning, both in how it was shot and the way the story is told. I don't think I've ever seen a more artistic drama, and since art is a huge part of the story that sold me and kept me watching. The whimper came at the end, which was what I'd predicted to myself it would be. I won't detail it, but it was probably regarded as clever by someone who reads a lot of Nicholas Sparks. Every romantic who watches it is probably going to get angry with that. Still, it's a beautifully-made series, and definitely rare for China. I'll recommend it for those reasons. Available on Viki.com.