Red Light Fairy Tale

Year of the Fish Directed by David Kaplan at Angelika Film Center

Here we go again, with yet another adaptation of the ever-popular Cinderella fairy tale. But in Year of the Fish, instead of couturier mice or hookers with hearts of gold or maids in Manhattan, we have Ye Xian (An Nguyen), a fresh-off-the-boat Chinese immigrant who finds herself in indentured servitude at a massage parlor in New York City’s Chinatown.

Bypassing the more famous European take on the story, writer-director Kaplan instead opts for the older Chinese version, one that involves a magical goldfish that leads to the fairy godmother. Of course, unless you’re familiar with the original tale, Year of the Fish just seems to be arbitrarily narrated by an enormous fish; in moments like this, it’s truly lovely to be a film critic with access to production notes.

What does come across, however, seems desperate to differentiate this retelling from the pack. To that end, Kaplan has ripped a page from Richard Linklater’s book and rotoscoped the entire film (tracing live-action images), turning it into something similar to Linklater’s Waking Life and A Scanner Darkly. But with Year of the Fish, the effect just seems like an ingenious way to disguise the cheapness of the budget. Purposefully done without the precision that Linklater has used in the past, the results often have the choppy, wavering look of a particularly dim webcam

To Kaplan’s credit, Year of the Fish does feature more than enough clever moments and ideas to compensate for forcing audiences to sit through yet another tale of a woman who needs a man to rescue her from a life of drudgery (though in this version, her rescue leads to a waitressing job). The massage parlor setting may have seemed fresh and inventive when the film was shot in 2005, but in a year that has seen the American releases of Irina Palm (starring Marianne Faithfull as a sex worker) and No Regret (featuring a Korean boy brothel), the locale seems old hat. But having a grotesque-looking fairy godmother named Auntie Yaga (Randall Duk Kim), who moonlights as the tyrant in charge of a Chinatown sweatshop, is a queasily brilliant notion.

The sequences featuring Auntie Yaga—who has the long fingernails of a seedy cocaine addict—are the film’s only truly dark moments, the times that the story seems genuinely based on a fairy tale. When the requisite “evil stepmother” and “evil stepsisters” make their appearances, Kaplan stacks the cards so much in their favor that their encounters with Ye Xian become almost unbearable. After being hit in the face repeatedly by the parlor’s madam, Mrs. Su (Tsai Chin), Ye Xian is later sent out to a bad neighborhood, where she is almost raped. Luckily, her very own Prince Charming—in the guise of accordion-playing Johnny Pan (Ken Leung)—happens by and rescues her.

Naturally, Year of the Fish makes us wait through much more abuse and tears before Ye Xian can live happily ever after—but there’s never a doubt she will. It’s just a shame that she can’t find a way to save herself, instead of complacently waiting in her own private hell for the lovesick Johnny to do it for her.