Film Still from 'The Other Half,' Directed by Ying Liang, China, 2006

Review by Michelle M. McCoy

This year’s San Francisco International Film Festival, which took place from April 26-May 10, included two feature-length films by directors born in mainland China—Ying Liang’s 'The Other Half' (另一半, China, 2006) and Guo Xiaolu’s 'How Is Your Fish Today?' (今天的鱼怎么样?, China/UK, 2007). Both films have found their audiences through non-mainstream channels—the international film festival circuit, DVD exchange, and the Internet—and are divergent takes on the subject of cinema in the globalized, politicized era of 'mainland Chinese film and filmmaking.

'The Other Half'

'The Other Half' is a hopeful, compassionate representation of gender relations and a traditional family on the decline in provincial post-Mao China. Xiaofen is a young legal clerk who meets with divorce and domestic dispute claimants while navigating the trials of her own private life. It is set in Zigong, a small industrial city in Sichuan whose primary economic activity is the production of hazardous chemicals. Zigong is “developing” into a toxic urbanized backwater. As ambitious, talented young males leave Zigong, quality of life and opportunity drop relative to the country’s larger, wealthier cities.

The film is directed by Shanghai-born Ying Liang, whose film 'Taking Father Home' received the Skyy Prize at the 2006 San Francisco International Film Festival. The story is based on Ying’s experience of male-female relations in Sichuan, where he feels women are the stronger members of society. Many of the film’s actors are relatives of Sichuan-born writer Peng Shan—including her cousin Zeng Xiaofei, who stars as Xiaofen. By day, the pretty twenty-something with a chronic, debilitating cough patiently documents the firm’s female clients’ claims, while at night she goes home to her drunken gambler boyfriend, her mother’s calamitous attempt at hooking her up with an older businessman, the return of her estranged father, and her “hostess” friend’s unsuccessful pursuit of a man with American connections.

Ying based all of the legal claims in the film on actual cases. Speaking like a journalist, he said, “We have a social responsibility to back [the film up] with facts.” Bringing accusations of adultery, addiction, abuse, loss of income, and other marriage-busting deeds, the women who come to the law firm raise questions about justice, retribution, and the rule of law in the realm of domestic disputes. Meanwhile, the firm’s seemingly benevolent head attorney, whose face, in a Wizard of Oz-style turn, is never shown, chooses to concern himself, like many of his clients, primarily with monetary gain.

Throughout, Xiaofen floats through life as though she is a somnambulist, while those around her desperately try to improve their lives, signalling, perhaps, her awareness that individual control over many conditions of life in the city of Zigong is limited. Xiaofen is consistently deadpan in response to people telling her she looks like superstar actress Zhang Ziyi, a running joke throughout the film. (The actual resemblance is slight.) One of the few, if not the only, instances of genuine emotion Xiaofen shows comes in a scene in which, after an argument in a restaurant with her boyfriend, he pursues her into an alleyway. She, with her back to him, faces the camera, giving a subtle smile of satisfaction visible only to the audience.

When a catastrophic leak at a benzene plant threatens explosion in Zigong, a voice broadcasts warnings and evacuation instructions to residents. Through the skillful use of this voiceover—an invisible, mysterious articulator of doom—Ying assigns environmental degradation a godlike role. Finally, male joins female, one half joins the other, just trying to get out of Zigong alive.

'How is Your Fish Today?'

“My life is like a plant, waiting for the seasons to change me.” So go the internal musings of Rao Hui, a screenwriter depicted in the film living out voluntary confinement in his Beijing apartment and in his imagination. Friends visit, a bamboo plant named Fellini dies, and a carp named Belle de Jour swims about in a fishbowl as, day in and day out, the screenwriter develops the journey of his fictional character Lin Hao. Lin Hao is a young man who, having murdered his girlfriend in the south, flees north to the remote border town of Mohe. Thus two parallel narratives develop and, ultimately, collide under the narration of protagonist Rao Hui, who is also the film’s co-screenwriter (along with director-writer Guo Xiaolu).

'How Is Your Fish Today?' is an intelligent, literary collage of directed, scripted, and unscripted footage. The scripted shots, such as the extreme close-ups of Rao Hui at his computer, tend to be highly stylized. The unscripted footage includes the director’s voice conducting impromptu interviews during Spring Festival with earnest travelers and reluctant railway workers on a train going to Mohe, the town made legendary in grammar schoolbooks for its display of the northern lights.

Recognized as an acclaimed novelist, director Guo Xiaolu said of her first-time feature-length film, “It’s a film really about a writer’s journey.” All along Rao Hui’s journey is his search for meaning, or perhaps excitement. Intimate details of his mundane life—his late-night cures for insomnia, his rituals at the gym—contrast with the extraordinary life he fabricates for Lin Hao. Challenging audiences’ expectations for films that fall neatly into a single category—documentaries, pure fiction, or pseudo-documentaries—'How Is Your Fish Today?' is also about film itself.

The film sets itself apart from other independent mainland Chinese cinema in its refusal to problematize contemporary China. It does not set out to expose—nor hide, thanks to the documentary footage—current social conditions in the way attendees of Western film festivals may expect. Instead, Guo and her collaborators are aiming at something new. Focusing on the collaborative nature of her filmmaking, Guo said, “There are lots of ‘underground’ [Chinese] films about poverty and China’s problems. We respect that, but think maybe we can do something different.” Her previous effort, 'The Concrete Revolution,' a documentary film depicting the lives of Chinese construction workers, received the Grand Prix at the 2005 International Human Rights Film Festival. 'How Is Your Fish Today?' presents instead a nuanced world through the mind of a writer not tortured by human rights abuses or oppressive political conditions, but, rather, challenged by his art. Throughout the film, opportunities do exist for political readings, for instance in the footage of an English-as-a-second-language lesson at a school in Mohe. The topic is oil, and the lesson is as much about future international oil shortage as it is about the pronunciation of words like “oil.” The film itself takes no more than aesthetic responsibility for such scenes; the reality the film sets out to depict is the one in the mind of its narrator, Rao Hui.

Although they work from different conceptual/aesthetic positions toward different filmic goals, 'The Other Half' and 'How Is Your Fish Today?' are both rejections of traditional studio filmmaking. While employing untrained actors may have been a necessity for such low-budget films, it was not necessarily a compromise. Ying Liang said, “It was not necessary to bring in professional actors; I’m not interested in current actor training.” His script was written specifically for actress Zeng Xiaofei in her first lead role.

In the San Francisco International Film Festival literature, both films were described as blends of documentary and fiction. It would perhaps be more accurate to describe both as being unconcerned with that very distinction, and being comfortable using a variety of cinematic approaches, employing with facility the minimally directed scene. Guo explained, “For [my crew and me], there is no difference between documentary and fiction.” In one beautiful and unplanned scene in 'How Is Your Fish Today?' the northern lights of Mohe are recorded not from the sky, but in the form of the light from a villager’s stove reflecting on his kitchen wall. Both Guo and Ying successfully step aside and allow for sublime and unforeseen moments such as this to happen.