Chinese Movie Database Blog

How is Your Fish Today?
UK 2006 In Putonghua with English subtitles
director: Guo Xiaolu
writer: Rao Hui, Guo Xiaolu

Screenwriter Rao Hui is writing a script for a thrill for a TV movie. His protagonist is a young man of similar age, Lin Hao, who kills his girlfriend in an arguement and flees from his southen hometown, travels across China on train, briefly stops in Beijing and meets a unnamed girl, then sets off towards the northest point of China, a village called Mohe, a place romanticised for this tranquility and beautiful arora in Chinese school textbook. Meanwhile, Rao Hui wanders around his Beijing flat, tries to keep his plant and gold fish alive, drinks tea, and watchs pirated western movie DVDs. While deciding the fate of Lin Hao, he decides to travel to Mohe himself by train. Will Rao Hui, and Lin Hao, find the answer in Mohe?

There are some good set pieces in this pseudo-documentary. The claustrophobic, busy and bustling urban life fits the tone of his voice over quite well, which is strongly in contrast with the lively, but equally harsh life conditions of Mohe. The world of Rao Hui is reflected on Lin Hao. There are also intriguing moments and encounters that could lead the plot to complete different direction. Rao Hui observes people, we observe him through his own creation.

The problem for me is this film’s lack of cinematic quality. To put it brutally, The whole experience is like listening to a novel read by the screenwriter while watching the accompaning animated pictures. The audiences are consistly bombarded by Rao Hui’s voice over, which insists on explaining everything happening on the screen. Rao Hui and Lin Hao’s thoughts are spoon-fed to the audiences almost word by word. It is a little wonder that when the most beautiful moment of movie, the preparing and eating of the fish by the village communist party member Sun Ge and his wife, comes, there is little voice over and dialogue, thankfully.

Perhaps the original intention of shooting a documentary film shows it restrains. It seems the director couldn’t make her mind on whether to make a documentary of screenwriter Rao Hui, or a full-blow fictional feature. The interview made on the train to Mohe, although funny and touching, is little odd to be inserted here. Although cited as a documentary, this film works very well for me as a fictional film. Rao Hui, who plays himself, is a writer in China and hosts a movie-review TV show. In a only few seconds of his TV show footage, we saw another Rao Hui, chatty and confident. It would be interesting to see the difference between the Rao Hui in this film and Rao Hui as the celerated
writer, or whether the story of Rao Hui told in this film is another fictionalised version, or a script written by Rao Hui. However all these are lost in the voice over.

2006.12.02

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