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.