Film: Fish Story
Release date: 28th May 2010
Running time: 112 mins
Director: Yoshihiro NakamuraStarring: Atsushi Ito, Kengo Kora, Mikako Tabe, Gaku Hamada, Mirai Moriyama
Genre: Drama
Studio: Third WindowFormat: Cinema
Country: Japan
In a quiet independent record store, three men gather as a comet threatens to destroy the whole planet. The eldest of the three is prepared for the end, having satisfied all his heart’s desires, while the youngest of the group struggles to accept his fate, believing that the world could yet be saved by Bruce Willis. But the owner of the record store harbours quiet conviction that a little-known song by an equally unknown ‘70s punk band will somehow save the world. Its title - “Fish Story”.
What is the story of “Fish Story”? And how could this one song be the glue that knits together fifty years of disparate, seemingly unconnected lives all destined to lead directly to the rescue of Planet Earth?
Fish Story is like no film you’ve ever seen before - for the most part, in the best possible way. Its visually rough look often achieves the kind of ‘quirky’ feel that simply cannot be manufactured, and its structurally ad hoc storytelling leaves the audience always unsure what is coming next. However, by playing its cards too close to its chest for too long, the film leaves the audience emotionally, intellectually and spiritually disengaged for long periods of its running time.
The cast of broadly sketched characters are played by likeable, but limited, actors who lack the range and presence to really keep the audience enthralled as the filmmakers spin their meandering stories. However, the film more than gets by on its infectious energy, and its obvious conviction in a unique story that is well worth the telling. The audience is never in doubt that the stories will pull together by the end, and that the whole will mean something.
The search for meaning is a theme alluded to, explicitly and implicitly, throughout. Quite what the film intends to say on the subject is never clear, thanks to a script that, for more than an hour, seems to have run away from the filmmakers. Meandering from an apocalypse in 2012, to a double date in 1982 that ends in violence and despair, through an ‘anti-climactic’ apocalypse in 1999, Fish Story almost consumes itself with its own ambition.
Things pick up with a mid-point ferry hijacking sequence that is a welcome gear-shift, even if the resulting action sequence lacks the kinetic verve to which it clearly aspires. The film shifts gears again to show the fortunes of Gekirin, the ‘70s Japanese punk band whose song will “save the world,” by which time the film, having not settled on a tone or even aesthetic style, seems to have finally run aground.
But, as it settles into its ‘origin story’, building to an absolutely riveting crescendo that finally reveals the answer as to why ‘Fish Story’, the song, contains a curious minute of supposedly intentional silence - it becomes clear that, for all its faults, Fish Story has worked its magic on you. Occasionally clumsy magic, to be sure - but magic nonetheless. And as it takes to the home stretch, finally showing its hand and revealing how the disparate stories knit together, it does so with a joy the audience cannot help but share.
Its meaning and message may be muddled, but this is joyous cinema, refreshingly un-manipulative for a story, with a non-linear narrative, and with heart in abundance. JN
No comments:
Post a Comment