Synopsis
A Chinese version of Cinderella story reborn in a massage parlor in Chinatown, New York. While is based on the Cinderella story, what makes it really interesting is not the movie's trunk but so many branches that grow out of the trunk. The movie rewrites the Cinderella story by dealing with the realities of marginalized classes, races and sex including China in New York, adult-only massage parlors, male clients and female masseuses. For example, the step mother who plagues Cinderella is the lady boss of the massage place that exploits sex workers, Fairy Godmother who turns Cinderella into a beautiful princess is a homeless witch of the city, and the prince is a poor jazz musician. Scenary of Chinatown within a famously multi-racial city of New York arouses visual excitement and the polarized setting of immigrants' harsh realities and Cinderella-like fantasy make the movie at once tense and relaxed. Modern-day, Chinese princess dreams of nothing but love despite her poor life instead of hope to climb up the social ladder through an encounter with a prince. The happy ending of this couple is to pay back debt as the price of their love. On the one hand, it is a Cinderella story which has more naive sensitivity than ever but on the other hand, it is a cold-hearted love story to demonstrate that there is a realistic logic that cannot be solved by love alone, which is in this case, the impossibility of class shift. Year of the Fish is a live action animation by real actors was shot first and then the film was used as an index to digital painting. Somewhere in between actual film and animation emerge dramatic and subtle change of facial expressions or in surroundings which cannot be captured by using either of the two media alone. It is as if the reality goes through a curtain of fairy tale and finally unfolds what it has to say in a whole new world. This seems a rather appropriate way to tell the modern-day Cinderella story, which is more tiresome due to its unbalance with its one foot placed in reality and the other in fantasy. (Nam Da Eun)