Traditional Culture Encyclopedia - Hotel franchise - Masked Hotel: Keigo Higashino played an emotional card in the reasoning story.

Masked Hotel: Keigo Higashino played an emotional card in the reasoning story.

The film Masquerade Hotel is adapted from the novel of the same name by Keigo Higashino, a famous Japanese mystery writer. The sales of the original work in Japan have exceeded 4 million. The film was produced by Dongbao Company, which gathered many stars such as Kimura Takuya, Masami Nagasawa, Matsu Takako and Atsuko Maeda. When it was released in Japan, the box office and reputation were quite good. Apart from the influence of Keigo Higashino and the All-Star cast, as a commercial film, the film reflects the superb professional standards of the Japanese film industry in terms of photography, costumes, props, lighting, music and fine arts.

More importantly, the professionalism reflected in this work can arouse the audience's cultural identity in Japan.

Stills of the movie "Masked Hotel"

Workplace spirit and social life

Although it begins with a serial murder case, half of the length of "Masked Hotel" focuses on hotel life and workplace spirit, which makes the film closer to a mixture of professional drama and suspense movie. The hotel is like a drama stage, which takes turns to stage all kinds of life stories of hotel guests with different secrets, like a complicated and tangled social kaleidoscope. In this process, through the confrontation and cooperation between male and female protagonists, the professional, rigorous and dedicated professionalism highly respected by Japanese society is fully reflected.

In a business reasoning film aimed at entertainment, trying to present the Japanese craftsman spirit, if it is too straightforward, it will be somewhat blunt, conceptual first or too didactic. However, the original novel skillfully integrates the spirit of professionalism into the conflicts of characters, which makes the audience unconsciously accept the ideas that the author wants to convey in the process of watching the hero and heroine from incompatible opposition and bickering to mutual affection and mutual assistance in solving crimes.

The identities of male and female protagonists are different, and their ideas are contrary, which will inevitably lead to all kinds of interesting sparks. Hirosuke Xintian, the criminal policeman played by Kimura Takuya, went undercover in the hotel in order to find clues to serial killings. He was extremely dedicated to solving the case and exploring the truth. As a newcomer to the hotel industry, he was constantly embarrassed; Masami Nagasawa plays the role of a hotel employee who is beautiful on the hillside and sticks to the professional concept of customer first in the hotel service industry, thinking that many things can be improvised under this premise. When they cooperate to deal with various problems, they are bound to bump into each other and be tit-for-tat. All kinds of conflicts construct the daily drama of the film. This group of tell it to the judge-style characters add some comedy tonality to the tension and suspense, making the overall atmosphere more relaxed and interesting.

The heroine's hotel working principles-patience, courtesy, meticulous attitude and meticulous attention to every detail-fully embody the conscientious and meticulous professionalism of the Japanese service industry. This spirit is reflected by the heroine's casual but habitual little gesture of straightening the paperweight. As the professional spirit of criminal police, the hero is good at observing and reasoning, and never misses a detail. In the most tense climax of the film, it is precisely because the hero observed the heroine's action of straightening the paperweight before that he noticed the placement of paperweight in a room when looking for the heroine kidnapped by the prisoner, and then judged that the prisoner and the heroine were hidden in this room. It can be said that it is the professional habits of the male and female protagonists that come together and interact with each other to find out the key breakthrough.

Keigo Higashino's film adaptation

However, since it was released in China, the rating of this film is not as good as that of other films adapted from Dongye novels.

The reason is that, besides the lack of * * *, this film is really not in the first echelon with the best quality in Keigo Higashino's work sequence, no matter the original novel or the adapted film. There are too many things that the work wants to express, not only to express the protagonist's professional spirit, but also to make choices and deletions to the stories of all the people in the hotel, which leads to a loose overall narrative and the lack of necessary logical connection between the main line of the case and multiple branch episodes. This narrative structure, if it is in a novel or adapted into a TV series with a unit structure, may not cause problems, but in a closed mainstream narrative film, it leads to a lack of emotional power in the end. The light comedy style of the film may make the audience feel happy in the process of watching, but after the film is over, it can't bring a deep emotional sound and shock. Among the best adaptations of Keigo Higashino, White Night Walk and The Dedication of Suspect X, the emotional power is extremely strong.

The movie "Walking at Night" stills

Keigo Higashino, as the most popular Japanese mystery novelist, absorbed the advantages of the Ben-style school and the social school, including the wonderful suspense and meticulous reasoning process of the Ben-style school, the complex and ambiguous human factors of the social school, the delicate and entangled emotional relationship, and the detailed description of social reality.

Apart from Walking at Night, Kaga Kyouichirou series and Galileo series are his most adapted works. The series of "Detective Galileo" is biased towards the stereotype and pays attention to the brain-burning and the complexity of the case, while the series of novels of "Kaga Kyouichirou" is biased towards social reasoning and attaches importance to the exploration of the depth of human nature and the portrayal of emotions. The adapted works include the TV series Malice, The New Participant, the movies Sleeping Forest, The Wings of Kirin, The Red Finger and At the End of Prayer.

The reason why these mystery films and dramas are popular is not that traditional mystery novels rely on a complicated and tortuous case reasoning process, but that they focus on "moving people with emotion". The most sensational works, such as A Night Walk, The Dedication of Suspect X, At the End of Prayer and Red Finger, all show a deep and touching feeling-love or affection.

The stills of the movie "The Dedication of Suspect X"

Keigo Higashino's creation turned to social reasoning, precisely because social reasoning was not limited to the old routine of "setting suspense reasoning, arranging a maze of reasoning and finally solving the mystery", but incorporated social background and reality, human nature problems and emotional relationships into the reasoning stories, so that readers who are not fans of reasoning can also get great pleasure in reading the stories of these novels. It can be said that it was from Seicho Matsumoto that the social school mystery novels continued by Miyuki Miyabe, Kotaro Isaka and Keigo Higashino really made mystery novels an important branch of Japanese literature.

From the perspective of Japanese film history, most of the most influential mystery films are also adapted from social mystery novels, such as Seicho Matsumoto's Sand, Fog Flag, Zero Focus, and Seiichi Morimura's Witness. These works are rich in emotion, humanity, ethics and social reality, which not only deepens the depth of reasoning works, but also easily triggers the audience's emotional buzz.

It can even be said that in Keigo Higashino's novels and adapted works, reasoning is only a container, and its richer and more textured social reality is the ontology of the works. Suspense, reasoning and fantasy are all more closely and organically intertwined with human emotions. After the film, the audience may not remember the reasoning process of the case, but they will be moved by the deep, selfless and dedicated emotional fetters in the film.

The movie "Masked Hotel" stills

The all-star cast of "Masked Hotel" is also one of the important strategies for Keigo Higashino's film adaptation. These works with best-selling original works and excellent box office results of adapted films often deepen the popularity of the protagonists with the help of star charm, such as Tang Chuanxue played by Fukuyama Masaharu and Kaga Kyouichirou played by Hiroshi Abe. Even the actors or victims of criminals often choose influential first-line stars to interpret a story of personal depravity or crime and atonement for love, such as Shinichi Tsutsumi in The Dedication of Suspect X, Satomi Ishihara in Sleeping Forest, Nakai Kichi in Wings of Kirin, Matsushima Nanako in At the End of Prayer, Matsu Takako in Masquerade Hotel, etc.

The reason why Keigo Higashino's works have been filmed again and again, even in China and South Korea, where there is no tradition of reasoning literature, is precisely because the creators in these countries often value not a tortuous and bizarre crime main line, but an emotional story with full emotional power. The cinematography of Keigo Higashino's reasoning works, which focuses on the route of emotion and humanity, attracts the audience in a melodrama way, which is also very effective from the perspective of genre narrative strategy. Coincidentally, in several domestic suspense dramas "Skyscraper" and "White Moonlight" this year, we also saw this kind of emotional-centered genre narrative, which may be the most potential direction of genre creation.

Author: Liu Qi (Doctor of Film Studies, Assistant Research Fellow of China Federation of Literary and Art Circles)

* The exclusive manuscript of Wenhui, please indicate the source.