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 ow
Is Your Fish Today?" began life as a
British-commissioned Chinese documentary about
Mohe, a small village in the northernmost part of
China
, lying on the Russian border. However, when the
crew reached Mohe, a supposedly mystical town
where it's light twenty hours out of the day and
the aurora borealis sweeps across the sky, they
discovered that it is nothing but a poor fishing
village where people live just above the poverty
line. Rather than abandon the film due to lack of
footage, director Xiaolou Gou synergised what she
had filmed with a script written by a friend about
a screenwriter searching for inspiration by
travelling to Mohe. The result: a film that
confidently occupies the shadow land between
fiction and reality.
We follow screenwriter Hui
Rao (who is actually played by the film's writer)
as he starts work on a script where the
protagonist is Lin Hao, a man who has just killed
his girlfriend and is fleeing across the country,
before eventually ending up in Mohe. We see the
character of Lin Hao as Hui Rao imagines him, and
as the film progresses the screenwriter and his
character become increasingly alike. Tired of
living vicariously through his own screenplay, Hui
Rao leaves his home town of
Beijing
and travels to Mohe, a place that he has idealised
since he was a schoolboy. However, once there, the
romanticism of Mohe vanishes, leaving nothing for
Hui Rao to see but vast acres of snow and
melancholy villagers trapped by poverty in the
middle of nowhere.
It takes a while to adjust to
the movie's style; for the first fifteen minutes
or so all I did was try to work out whether what I
was seeing was real or fictitious. It's safe to
assume that 90% of "How is Your Fish
Today?" is fact; Hui Rao is a real
screenwriter, the people interviewed on the train
to Mohe are real people and yes, Mohe is a real
place. However this is hard to realise because the
scenes in which Hui Rao imagines the life of Lin
Hao are shot in a very similar way to scenes of
the real-life Mohe villagers, and there is no
visible difference in style between the two. This
documentary style is adopted all the way through
to the end, where it perversely becomes
cinematic.
But it helps not to over
think these things. It is better to let "How
is Your Fish Today?" take you where it wants
to take you: on a journey with Hui Rao to possibly
the most enigmatic village on Earth. And, for the
most part, "How is Your Fish Today?" is
a brilliantly constructed analysis of the flaws of
romanticism. Hui Rao's purpose for writing his
script was to see Mohe. However, having built up a
mental image since he was young of a beautiful
place lit only by strings of torches, it's no
surprise when he finds his ideas shattered by the
real thing.
Having seen the destitution
of the village, Hui Rao becomes just as trapped as
the inhabitants of Mohe; he is bored by his life
in
Beijing
, and has seen that his perfect town is worse than
the place he was trying to escape. Xiaolou Gou
highlights this with an effective use of
anticlimax, in an ending that is as abrupt as it
is dream-like, literally joining the real and the
imaginary together.
The only problem with
"How is Your Fish Today?" is that it
loses focus towards the end. What was, for two
thirds of the movie, a bildungsroman of a
depressed writer becomes a completely different
film once we get to Mohe. Instead of continuing
the story of Hui Rao, it takes a break from it to
concentrate on the people of Mohe. At this point
"How is Your Fish Today?" stops being an
analysis of romanticism, and starts being an
analysis of
China
's bizarre social climate, where the wealthy are
extremely wealthy, and the poor are extremely
poor.
Although hinted at earlier in
the film, this angle comes more or less out of
nowhere, and doesn't really fit in with the
previous themes already presented. However since
"How is Your Fish Today?" is a composite
of two different films, I feel that this was
probably the focus of Gou's original documentary,
but didn't necessarily fit in with Hui Rao's
script. But while this change in focus is erratic,
it is nevertheless interesting.
An innovative narrative,
beautiful imagery, gritty truths and good
philosophy make "How is Your Fish
Today?" an outstanding piece of cinema. And
even though it does flounder a bit towards the
end, it's still a very worthwhile watch that I
would recommend to anyone.
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