With an oddball title, and a premise that plays between fiction and reality, How is Your Fish Today? might be seen as a Chinese riff on Charlie Kaufmann, or could just as easily be tarred with that reductive label ‘quirky’. However, this would be to ignore the film’s thematic concerns and meditative mood, and ultimately its rather subversive streak (especially considering its Chinese origins). It looks at a struggling scriptwriter, Rao Hui (played by Rao Hui), who gets a commission to write a story about Lin Hao (played by Lin Hao), a man who in the fictional story murdered his wife in Southern China. His first script is rubbished, and consequently Rao draws himself into the proceedings more and more as he writes again. Eventually the film becomes a blur of real and make-believe, and ultimately, what images are shown, cannot be trusted as being true. In this respect, the film questions the veracity of propaganda, and exults in the disrepute of images.

Even more so, How is Your Fish Today? is a touching story about a man in search of an idealised moment, whether it’s a story or a life experience. Both men are drawn towards the village of Mohe, the northernmost settlement in China, where aurora borealis can be seen, and people can wander over into Siberia. Mohe becomes an idealised place for Rao, and the film becomes an almost ethnographic documentary when he films ordinary people doing ordinary things on the way to, and in, Mohe. Rao makes frequent mention of Eric Rohmer’s The Green Ray, making the link to his own life as an ordinary person in search of a green ray, that little glimmer of hope.

This is a vaguely impressionistic, multi-styled film. Parts feel like a cinéma-vérité documentary, while others have a haunting art-film quality to them. The mood is quite distant, and consequently perhaps a little cold as a result. But as the narrative closes in on itself, it becomes a moody and evocative deconstruction of the filmic image itself, and challenges the inherent trust we place in the moving image.—Brannavan Gnanalingam