Fish and Elephant, which is generally regarded as China's first explicitly lesbian movie, portrays the many challenges and difficulties facing two single Beijing women in their late 20s, Xiaoqun and Xiaoling, who fall in love and seek to build a new life together as a couple. Xiaoqun works as an elephant keeper in the zoo, Xiaoling has an indoor market stall where she tries to sell home-made clothes and jewellery while avoiding the unwanted attentions of her ex-boyfriend and other tiresome male customers. Xiaoqun has a steady job and her own basement flat, where she and Xiaoling live together and a fish tank takes pride of place, but Xiaoqun's divorced mother, who at first is quite unaware of her daughter's sexual orientation, is forever trying to set her up with highly unsuitable male suitors. However, a more serious threat to Xiaoqun and Xiaoling's relationship comes when Xiaoqun's former lover Junjun reappears, now wanted by the police for the murder of her abusive father, and when Junjun is surrounded by armed police in the zoo, all seems set to end in jealousy, bloodshed and tragedy.
Dr. Michael CLARK (King's College London)
Li Yu (b. Jinan, Shandong Province, 1973) is one of China's best-known female directors. She began her career in film and television at a very young age working as a local TV presenter in Shandong, before moving on to become a television director and screenwriter with China Central Television. Her early films for television were all documentaries, but in 2001 she embarked on a new, high-risk career as an independent feature film-maker with Fish and Elephant, a highly personal and largely self-funded project regarded as China's first explicitly lesbian movie. However, Li Yu decided to make this film as part of a much broader interest in depicting the condition of women of all kinds in China today, not only lesbians, from a broadly feminist standpoint, and this wider interest is apparent in several of her subsequent films, notably Dam Street (2005), Lost in Beijing (2007) and Ever Since We Love (2015), all of which feature heterosexual women from very different backgrounds in leading roles. Moreover, beginning in 2007 with Lost in Beijing, Li Yu has also established a close collaboration with Fan Bingbing, one of China's best-known models and actresses, whose participation has greatly enhanced the box office appeal of her more recent films.
While Zhang Yuan's East Palace, West Palace (1996) might seem an obvious point of comparison with Li Yu's Fish and Elephant, by virtue of their shared concern with same-sex love relationships, a more appropriate comparison might actually be with Zhang Yuan's 'documentary-feature films' like Mama (1991). Although not normally associated with the Chinese 'New Documentary' movement of the 1990s and 2000s, several of Li Yu's fiction films, including Fish and Elephant, employ many of the same techniques as independent Chinese documentaries of this time, including the casting of non-professional actors in leading roles, the use of unmodified locations and natural lighting and ambient sound effects, and a mix of raw hand-held camera footage and fixed camera positions with long takes. All these serve to highlight Li Yu's ongoing and passionate interest as a film-maker in contemporary and predominantly urban Chinese social reality, and especially in the key insights into this social reality provided by the rapidly changing but still precarious and conflicted lives of modern Chinese women. Turning down invitations to make films abroad, Li Yu has said that contemporary China is the place par excellence for film-makers like herself to make movies, not because she is Chinese, but because China offers so much more by way of raw material for social actuality-based film scenarios.
Dr. Michael CLARK (King's College London)
While appearing to chart the ups and downs and eventual near-tragic denouement of the present and past relationships between three women, Xiaoqun, Xiaoling and Junjun, Fish and Elephant is ultimately less about same-sex love between women than about the situation of women generally in modern, 'post-socialist' Chinese society at the beginning of the twenty-first century. All three of the principal characters are lesbians, but screenwriter-director Li Yu's interest in them is not so much in their same-sex orientation as in how their lesbianism interacts with and challenges the dominant code of heterosexuality in such a way as to bring many more general and problematic aspects of the position of women in modern Chinese society into sharper focus. As Li Yu herself has remarked, Xiaoqun's relationship with her conventionally heterosexual divorced mother, which is crucial to some of the most interesting and socially revealing scenes in the movie, is also a same-sex relationship. in this respect, Fish and Elephant also foreshadows some of the director's later films, notably Dam Street (2005) and Lost in Beijing (2007), both of which highlight the vulnerability and unjust treatment of women in more or less conventional heterosexual relationships.
Dr. Michael CLARK (King's College London)
Although Li Yu is not usually associated with the Chinese 'New Documentary' movement of the 1990s and 2000s, Fish and Elephant employs many of the same techniques as independent Chinese documentaries of this time, including the use of non-professional actors in the leading roles, the use of unmodified locations and natural lighting and ambient sound effects, and direct actuality footage filmed in conventional documentary style with fixed camera positions and long takes. This is particularly apparent in the scenes where Li Yu surreptitiously films real men who have responded to bogus newspaper advertisements placed in lonely hearts columns. With their hilarious revelations of the mentality of single or widowed Chinese men of a certain age, these scenes introduce an element of satirical comedy into a film which otherwise veers between gritty social realism and melodrama, while avoiding the cliches of romantic comedy.
