**/****
starring Tsai Chin, Randall Duk Kim, Ken Leung, An Nguyen
written and directed by David Kaplan
by Alex Jackson I'm not quite sure why David Kaplan's Year of the Fish doesn't work, but I think it might have something to do with a fundamentally tainted central concept: the Cinderella story retold with a Chinese girl being sold into slavery in New York's Chinatown district. Cinderella is Ye Xian (An Nguyen), which was Cinderella's real name in the original Chinese folktale published a good 800 years before the better-known Perrault version. Xian must reimburse her benefactor for the cost of her room, board, and ticket by giving sensual massages at Mrs. Su's massage parlour. As Xian refuses, an enraged Su makes her do all the menial labour instead. Trapped and alone, Xian takes solace in a lucky goldfish bequeathed to her by ghostly crone Auntie Yaga and in the potential affections of the Chinese-American Johnny. (Virtually everybody besides Johnny and his immediate friends speaks in heavily-accented English, and possibly to help mask the potential racial caricaturing, the entire film is rendered in rotoscoped animation.) On a broad level, Year of the Fish is about the co-existence of the modern and the ancient, as if a film made completely in and about Chinatown would be about anything else. I suppose the ugly reality of indentured servitude is meant to be a function of this, but it overwhelms rather than complements the fantasy elements; the film feels a little too sad. And I'm not sure that Kaplan has completely thought out the ramifications of this material. Mrs. Su and her massage parlour are seen as corrupting Chinese culture: she's packaging and marketing Chinese femininity and carving out her chunk of the American dream with it. But Johnny seems to fall in love with Xian because, unlike his unfaithful Anglo girlfriend, this Asian damsel looks like she'll know how to be loving and obedient. I don't believe he values her heritage because it makes him feel closer to his own–he lives in Chinatown! So how different is he, really, from the guys who solicit a happy ending from a pretty Oriental girl? Isn't he buying the same thing in less direct terms? That's the problem with depicting fairytales in a real-world setting: all the psychology.
