The Fish Child

Years ago director Lucia Puenzo's debut, "XXY", made a strong impression on me. Raw, emotionally disturbing, it was a movie that kept me thinking for days. So when I noticed her new movie, "the Fish Child", I made a mental note to check it out (even though the movie's posters and trailers had the look of a badly executed lesbian porn). Last week I finally watched it on Netflix. I took me a while to recognize one of the main characters was played by the actress who also played Alex in "XXY". How she had grown. What a happy surprise!

The movie itself, however, was a bit of a let down. Though it's not the director's first movie, it felt more like a debut than "XXY". The story telling was less fluent. The "magic realism" often failed to translate (a surprise, since I always thought it would be easy to show magic realism in movies). Some characters didn't feel fully developed. However, even with all its flaws, there were still a few things I found interesting. 

One was the movie really captured the class differences between the two characters, the gap between the rich and the poor, the main stream (the Argentina) and the border (the Guayi). (The main/border theme also showed in "XXY", but felt much more poignant in "the Fish Child".) It was a constant theme in many South American movies, but it was the first time I finally "got" it. 

The coming of age of the character Lala was another theme I especially liked (I am a big sucker for coming of age movies, I sometimes wonder if it is because I have not grown out of it myself). In the beginning of the movie, we saw her escaped to Paraguay, after (spoiler alert) perhaps accidentally killing her father. At that time, she was just a spoiled teenager who had a crush. She was passive of her own fate. As her journey went, she went through a few transformations. Her decision to come back to Buenos Aries was the first one, a turning point. Then she cut her own hair, it was both an initiation ritual and a symbol that she had created her own identity. From now on we knew she would be the author of her own destiny, and we eagerly waited to see if it reached a happy ending. (You  would find it out in the end.) 

I had to watch "the Fish Child" a couple of times to piece together the whole story (probably not the best use of my time).  Though it was flawed, like "XXY", the movie kept me thinking (and even write this blog). And that, perhaps, is a quality worth seeing.