Fantastic Fest 2009

Before the Sex Pistols, there was Gekirin, a Japanese punk band struggling to carve out a space for their music apart from the easy listening, soft rock ballads dominating the airwaves in 1975. Although they failed to achieve recognition for their pioneering sound, the group managed to release one single that later sparked a cult following among a small set of collectors. While all manner of urban myths circulated over the years as to the meaning of the song “Fish Story,” no one could ever have guessed the fantastic destiny the recording would someday fulfill.

Gekirin’s story is the anchor at the center of director Yoshihiro Nakamura’s decades-spanning, brain-teasing, apocalyptic, alternative universe, in which seemingly disparate narratives are woven together to form a portrait of the extraordinary from the raw material of each character’s tiny trials and triumphs.

The film opens on a deserted Tokyo neighborhood in the year 2012. Disaster is about to strike the earth in the form of a comet that scientists predict will cause the extinction of the human race. Three strangers, who’ve met by chance at the only place in the city still holding regular business hours – a record store - debate whether or not it’s possible to avert the world’s impending end. The optimistic naïf among them drops the first of Nakamura’s kitschy absurdist winks to the audience when he begins to wail about Project Armageddon, the failed American attempt to plant nuclear weapons on the comet. A pop-saavy intertextual journey ensues as we are transported from the future to the past and back and forth again, oh-so-close and yet still not quite able to see where the twists in this whopper of tall tale are going to land. When the dust finally settles, viewers will no doubt find that FISH STORY’s most satisfying achievement is its playful defiance of even the sharpest movie-goer’s intuition. Eat your heart out, M. Night. (Carrie Matherly)