Monday, May 7, 2007

How Is Your Fish Today? - Reaction

[China]

A decent enough I suppose cross between a piece of fiction and a documentary on Mohe, a remote, oft romanticized town in the north of China. It's about a screenwriter and his invented character. They're both on journeys: the character to escape the police (though they don't appear to be pursuing him) and the screenwriter to escape the monotony of his life in Beijing. It's told in a very literary manner, not simply caused by the narrator speaking often (i.e., many words) but rather in the tone. One can tell the people that wrote the film are writers. The section of the movie focusing on the screenwriter further supports this belief; those scenes do a good job exemplifying the solitary life-of-the-mind of a writer.

The film has at least two levels of reality: the screenwriter and the character. For most of the film, these levels are kept separate. The beautiful music contributes to the distinction by changing mood to indicate which parts are story and which are real life. Near the end of the film, this demarcation blurs. And then the situation is further complicated by some documentary-style scenes of Mohe, in a few of which one can feel the film-makers' presence. (This occurs earlier in the movie as well, though not as often or visibly.) This felt odd, like the film acquired yet another level.

Before the showing, the director revealed she was originally intending to do a documentary on Mohe. However, after visiting, they realized it was a small, boring, impoverished town -- nothing to make a movie out of. So they combined a script with the documentary footage and ended up with this oddity.

I found my attention wandering not infrequently. I didn't miss parts of the movie -- it's simply that I had time to lose focus before the narrator said more lines or the scene changed. This occurred more often after the narrator arrives in Mohe and the movie acquires a documentary feel and loses much of its narrative momentum.

Fish imagery comes out repeatedly. I'm not sure what it means. Spottings include:

  • the fish in the writer's studio (that usually don't survive the week, yet he recently bought another because a professional told him he needed to buy one to balance the energies in his studio);
  • the fish in the frozen river, perhaps representing the commonality between Mohe and Russia. (The fisherman shout the question asked in the title to their foreign compatriots.)
  • the fish as a dish eaten in a long, slow scene by a couple in Mohe;
  • the fish caught by the crew from the frozen river as part of the documentary section of the film;
  • the fish hanging from the line in the southern town from which the fictional character escapes.
The director/co-writer, co-writer/actor (who played the screenwriter), and composer answered questions after the screening. The director had some interesting comments on the film and how they made it:
  • The striking, and strikingly long, nearly silent fish eating scene near the end exemplifies the relationship between man and wife in rural China.
  • The film was made on a small budget. That fact wasn't obvious: it looked fine to me.
  • They had difficulty filming in Mohe because, at negative thirty degrees Celsius, the camera batteries would drain within twenty minutes. Thus, they could shoot very little outdoors each day.
  • The people on the train to Mohe and in Mohe itself were very open around the camera. They talked and behaved as if it wasn't there. It's amazing to watch -- one doesn't see this type of openness in the western world. The director believes it's because most media, especially reality shows, hasn't made it there yet. They have no preconceptions about how people on camera should act or how the camera can distort things.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

A Comment from A Fellow Escapee

Criticism of the royalty was not permitted during the middle-ages France, and that's how the literary form of Fable came about. In it animals take the place of and symbolize humans to indirectly criticize them; so this film is a modern days' fable of life in China, where the direct criticism of the Communist ideology and leadership is not permitted.
I lived half of my life in Communism, although in Romania, not in China, before escaping to freedom, but I cannot begin to tell you how close to home this movie hit me! Just as its structure is designed to be, this film should be seen and understood on many different levels.
This documentary has the value of a message smuggled out from inside a jail that happens to be of the size of a country. It takes not just a masterful writer to depict the life inside tyranny, but he must do so in a "code" meant to make it pass by the customary Communist censorship on its way IN OR OUT of jail, but at the same time, it should be vividly obvious to an unprejudiced reader. And here is where part of the problem lays: Free men can hardly imagine the utter loneliness and spiritual void of living in a limited world of Communist totality. It is like living inside an ideological laboratory experimenting of unwilling humans, to try devoid them of hope and of the normal desires for the endless variety of colors, sounds and events in a free society. Like in the film, nothing is permitted without control, not even dating more than one person at a time, which if observed by neighbors, it can trigger the arrest of our young culpable woman by the people's militia. Our character thankfully escapes by dissipating himself into the limitless yet un-descript universe of Beijing. Seeking individuality, no matter how small, the writer goes shopping for a winter hat and is trying one on while the store assistant comments that it makes him look very much like a well know Communist hero... "very becoming!" A jail is a jail no matter its size! A big one is just that: more of the same no matter how far you venture within its walls. The fish is the sameness, the lack of variety, of options and of choices. It is what the daily life in China feels like to an intellectually hungry young man, looking for more, for answers beyond the strict social fence. There is no mention of the word "freedom" of any kind (which must be understood that it would have never made it pass censorship), yet to a prejudiced observer as I, one can almost feel its energy building itself up; or perhaps it is only the observer's optimism who wants it that way!
Interestingly, the fish is always dead or dieing; the fish is definitely not happy! The very symbol of exhausting resources.
The sameness is even bigger than that big country, for it reaches beyond the very strict limits of the border and it shows that even in Russia it appears to be more about the same fish (to me, a vivid extrapolation of life lived under the same condition; Russian and Chinese fishermen talking across the border about the only thing they have in common with one another;
It was that young couple out for a walk in the bitter cold in Beijing, hands in their pockets, empty streets, countless uninviting benches, patches of snow swept by wind, not a soul in sight and nowhere else to go, that reminded me of what my life as a young student has been in Bucharest in the 70's, where it was, too, illegal for an unmarried couple to be together in the same hotel room. Neighbors informed on that young woman that she was seen inviting more than one man inside her apartment within one week's period, four, I believe, which apparently triggers suspicions of lesser morals. Uniformed policemen knock at her door just when the couple where about to have dinner and takes them away. The character pushes one of the policeman and runs out of the building to escape into the city. The millions of Beijing are all the same; the cars, the streets; our character has the same name and same occupation as many others in the phone book, so the producer remarks that even for the police would be very difficult to find anyone here. But just to hide from the police is not what our character wants. He seeks hope. The need to seek hope even if one did not learn how to articulate it as such, it is what this film is about. Just like the fish is always silent not by choice: A dream like image becomes embodied by "Mohe", the far away village, so far that "even our great Communist nation" has not been able to bring electricity, TV and other 'conquests of progress' to. The image Mohe becomes romanticized by its sheer distance from the bulk of the country, which in itself may be enough to diminish the grip of society’s control. Then there is the lack of factual information (so common in the Communist world) and by its reclusive location, hopefully far away from the sameness, also. Travelers who are asked, they all have their own image of Mohe. But there is at least one traveler who asks if they have an official permission to film and firmly dictates that they are not permitted to film in the train. Just before the train reached its terminus, a woman's voice coming out of the train's speakers in a form of a pre-recorded advertisement, spoke of a "truly Northern Paradise"; There, they say, one can see the Northern Lights (another symbol of the exotic) that another traveler on the train did not even know what they were, confusing them with a Sun eclipse.
Yet, the last part of the pilgrimage to Mohe must be taken on foot across the frozen vastness; But Mohe proves to be nothing more than what our character was running from: "No restaurants, no movie theaters, just one store..." One stated irony: they did have a small power generator building in the village, running noisy and unattended, so at least one myth proved to be false.
Here, the fish comes from under the ice. Some attend a local Christian church. That is of some variety, of course, however boring it appears to be, but the man eating the fish at the end, is not allowed go to, because he is a Communist. His wife cleans the fish and serves it whole in a bowl (which looks purely disgusting). He speaks only to ask for the fish's head, the last part of the fish left (there's a symbol in that, too) and keeps eating it in silence for the longest time until the lights go out, cut off from the generator, tonight perhaps a little earlier than expected. The man tends the fire in the stove to make it burn through the night.
Next morning, our main character lies dead in the snow (not unlike the fish being harvested every day) and the producer wanders by guessing that he may have died trying to cross the border into Russia. As the film goes, we notice that the difference between the writer/ producer and the main character, becomes of lesser importance until they become one, just as he discovers in the end that perhaps his character was invented to help the producer experience what he did not dare to experience on his own.
Of the many attempts by talented writers to bring a taste of reality out from the inside Communism to an unprejudiced western observer, this one is one of the very best. Take it from a hungry fellow who lived and ate the fish one half of a lifetime in that world portrayed, a world that might as well be on another planet and the other half here, in America!