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Frost_edelweiss

Frost_edelweiss

Party A Who Lives Beside Me chinese drama review
Completed
Party A Who Lives Beside Me
0 people found this review helpful
by Frost_edelweiss
Mar 12, 2022
24 of 24 episodes seen
Completed
Overall 9.0
Story 10.0
Acting/Cast 9.5
Music 3.0
Rewatch Value 8.0
This review may contain spoilers

An interesting and different business comedy

Despite the terrible subtitling, which really needs to be replaced by a better version, and the strange goose honk sounding voice of the FL actress (dubbed?), I thought the story was interesting even to last episode, where suspense was still ongoing.
I watched it on YouTube, where some songs were also bizarrely erased while the dialogue was not but less clear to hear then. Anyway, the music was really not so good that it would make me look up the OST.

There is not a big variety of settings and some images come back many times, it looks very low budget. Nevertheless, the views of Shanghai apart from the expected Pudong skyline did show some interesting views of converted warehouses, waterside or countryside places in or about the metropolis, decrepit neighborhoods, and rather decent new buildings.

The small cast is good, and the actors and actresses have enough enthusiasm to make up for these quibbles. Both leads Wang ZiXuan (playing Ye Xuan) and Xie BinBin (playing Lin ZeNan) and the secondary couples leads Zhu Ran (playing photographer He YuCheng,), Zhai GuanHua (playing restaurateur Hu Yani), Liu ZhiHui (playing accountant Guo Tianlei), Ke Ying (playing LiNa), Yang DingQi (playing 88Ed studio director), Nikki Chen (playing Lin XinXia) and other main supporting characters draw audience into the interesting business story and light romance.
The magic of numbers comes again in this 520 story, but just as a discreet nudge to audience that get those meanings and jokes. I was surprised that a Floor 4 would be shown and that the two lead characters would dare to live there, although that was of course the reason for the cheap rent price, where 4,000 rmb was repeatedly mentioned for the small 2 room unit.

The expected romance and comedy are not the biggest draw for this drama, although it is nicely carried out with less “skinship” moments than loving support ones. The usual amount of slow motion closed lips kissing, catching stumbling damsels in distress, and carrying one on ML's back are also expected. Nevertheless, there are some very funny sweet moments, like the cat-like coming and going across Ye Xuan and Li ZeNan’s balconies, although one about climbing over a gated wall looked like it was a nod to Eternal Love 1-2-3 (the drama with Liang Jie as XiaoTan) and I briefly wondered whether this would go in the same fantasy direction since we did have once again a really tall, empowered ML looking rather cold to start with, and a rather shorter and less athletic, newcomer FL with a warmer outgoing temper. But no. (Ye Xuan was no pushover, she had some self-defense training!)
Some scenes that were certainly meant as slapstick humor like the redoubtable mother wielding a leek as beating stick, commercials TV ads blunders or blind dating made me smile, although they were not exceptional. The appearance of the well-respected director Sha WeiQi (who made a few dramas I also enjoyed, like A River Runs Through It and To Fly With You) first puzzled me, then I realized, and it was a sweet surprise!

Still, other elements that relate to real life Chinese work culture are, I think, very well included. I came out of this fairly enlightened about the practices of outsourcing and sub-contracting tasks to a Party B by a Party A that was the legalese which inspired the story and its title, and about some real life dangers of conducting business and construction work in China where reputation must be particularly protected, but where people still strive to keep an optimistic outlook and trust in friendship to overcome hurdles.


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