Fried Dragon Fish (1993) User Reviews (3)

Asano gleams in muddy waters

[squelcho · 6/10 · 10 September 2005]

This made-for-TV drama has some interesting moments, especially when Iwai lets the camera rest for a moment. The female lead (Myoko Yoshimoto) is as relentlessly hyper as the female ghost in Ghost Soup, but I suppose that's par for the course in TV land. The private detective who bookends the film is little more than a footnote and acts like one, as do most of the one dimensional auxiliary characters. The story is probably too purposefully oblique (shallow?) for its own good, looking a bit cheesy jumpcut TV pretentious on occasion, but Tadanobu Asano shines very brightly in an early appearance as a youth who likes tropical fish, classical music, and occasional flashes of calculated violence.

Some faint ripples from the early work of JJ Beineix can occasionally be seen, most notably in the use of classical music, and the way that the parts are greater than the whole. The story is weak, but some of the visuals are splendid. Particularly a short pink section showing a heavy swell at sunset. The loft where the boy (Asano) lives is aesthete heaven, and I couldn't help thinking that Iwai was trying to sneak some high art into a fairly lowbrow TV commissioned piece. I'm just guessing, but the flashes of outrageous beauty seemed quite incongruous in the context of the rather prosaic plot.

Worth watching if you want to see how Shunji Iwai and Tadanobu Asano started out. Both seem to be on the fast track to quality movie making, particularly Asano, who effortlessly dominates proceedings. All in all, I enjoyed watching the slightly transparent TV production plot devices, and lazy televisual editing. The subtitles drag slightly behind the dialogue on the DVD I saw, but not enough to confuse. Apart from that, they're uniformly excellent. While it isn't a lost masterpiece or hidden gem, Fried Dragonfish is short, and pretty enough in patches, to gently amuse without overly taxing your brain or your patience.

hit-and-miss early Iwai hints at greater things to come

[LunarPoise · 5/10 · 28 September 2008]

A detective looking for a rare variety of dragon fish signs up to try out a new information database. The salesman stresses that a 'pretty temp' in her twenties comes with the package to help you figure out its workings. Enter Poo, a brassy rough diamond who elbows her way into the detective's caseload. What she doesn't realise is that the fish is in the possession of assassin-in-waiting Tadanobu Asano.

That is about as much of the plot as can be gleaned from this patchy, lightweight effort from Iwai that pleases the eye more than anything else. Very much like Picnic, the film allows glimpses of the lush visual style that would become Iwai's forte, and clearly shows Asano as a star in ascendancy, without actually paying off on total in terms of emotional punch. There is a romance, but it is flat. There is a bad guy, but we never get to know anything about him. Interestingly, there are non-Japanese actors who are cringe-inducingly bad, sheer criminal in fact. Recently, with regard to films like Silk and Memoirs of a Geisha people complain about the orientalist perspective of Asians on cinema screens. It is rarely mentioned that such wooden, two-dimensional occidentalist projections of non-Japanese are fairly common in J-Cinema. Thankfully, Iwai sorted it all out to a mesmerising degree in Swallowtail, still the intercultural movie primus inter pares.

Like Picnic, Iwai fans charting his trajectory will enjoy seeing the rough edges that were smoothed out later (the jarring classical music, the OTT TV acting). If you are coming to Iwai for the first time, do not start here. Go to Love Letter first, then Swallowtail Butterfly. If you do not like either of those, you'll despise this. If LL and SW do it for you, come here to see the nascent musings of one of cinema's greatest living directors.

Shunji Iwai : an ardent follower of television film aesthetics ! ! ! ! !

[FilmCriticLalitRao · 6/10 · 25 July 2008]

This is one of cult Japanese director Iwai Shunji's early films.It was made when he was experimenting with form,style and content of his forthcoming films."Fried Dragon Fish" a one of those rare combinations seen in films which feature a computer,a fish and a detective.It must be mentioned that famous Japanese actor Asano Tadanobu is one of the biggest reasons for appreciating this film.This is a medium length film heavily based on television film aesthetics.All the colors,sets and decoration appear as if they have been lifted from a television studio.It is still not clear whether "Fried Dragon Fish" should be termed as a thriller as it lacks credible elements of thriller cinema.What we see in this film is a series of filmed images which are bathed in a meandering narrative.This is one of this film's most relevant problematic issues.Influence of modern day America can be also be felt in this film as its protagonists' borrow heavily from American ways of life.