Rest assured, Analeine Cal y Mayor's The Boy Who Smells Like Fish is not a porn. Instead, it's a very mediocre, awkwardly idiosyncratic fable that, despite being a Mexican-Canadian co-production, plays very much like the litany of competent but forgettable English-Canadian fare that makes the rounds at small film festivals before dropping into obscurity every year.
Here, much as the title suggests, a boy is born to a Spanish-Canadian mother (Ariadna Gil) and a douchebag father (the perpetually uncharismatic and pretentious Don McKellar) with the distinct aroma of our aquatic ocean friends. His parents hop from doctor to doctor trying to determine why their son smells like a garbage strike during a heat wave, but are met with half-assed justifications and prescriptions for specialty soaps that ultimately do nothing. This is all set up quite quickly and with little perspective or guiding tone, merely providing a backdrop for the central plight of Mica (Douglas Smith), noting his inability to forge legitimate relationships and giving a superficial rationale for his instinct to retreat from the world.
Within moments, Mica is a teenager with an absent father and a deceased mother, swimming at the local pool whenever he's not giving guided tours of his house, which is a museum honouring Guillermo Garibai, the Mexican crooner. So that we have an idea about what Mica is thinking, there's also the introduction of a psychiatrist (Carrie-Anne Moss), which manifests in little more than a bit of romantic transference and exceptionally broad analyses of outsider psychology.
Unfortunately, since the observations about what it's like to be marginalized are cursory at best, there's very little dramatic tension or resulting emotional investment. This leaves the infrequent and painfully strained comedy to do the heavy lifting, which is problematic since it's unsure if it wants to be a dark comedy, making light of Mica's contextually devastating upbringing, or just a skewed view of a world that's just slightly adjacent — a hyperbolic, kitschy externalized projection of Mica's mental state — to reality. Resultantly, the tenuous romance between Mica and the overly amiable and mostly undefined Laura (Zoë Kravitz) serves as little more than routine thematic filler to remind us all to make lemonade when life hands us (smelly) lemons.
Given the collective peripheral elements that all lead back to the cultural diaspora that stems from being biracial — Mica is biracial, his love interest is of yet another race and the film itself is a Mexican-Canadian co-production — the funky aroma that our protagonist tries to mask with a car freshener seems to represent a variety of ways in which being marginalized is manifested. As such, the basic message of staying strong in the face of adversity isn't at all problematic or shortsighted in any way; it's just a tad anodyne, especially when accompanied by such diffident, ineffectual filmmaking.
The Boy Who Smells Like Fish isn't bad — in fact, it's very watchable — but it doesn't take any risks or have any real vision or consistency. Unlike its unique protagonist, there's nothing unique or even noteworthy about this film: everyone delivers serviceable performances, and the message is delivered clearly, but there's nothing beyond that to make it worth revisiting or even thinking about after the credits roll. If it were a fish, it would be tilapia.
(eOne)Here, much as the title suggests, a boy is born to a Spanish-Canadian mother (Ariadna Gil) and a douchebag father (the perpetually uncharismatic and pretentious Don McKellar) with the distinct aroma of our aquatic ocean friends. His parents hop from doctor to doctor trying to determine why their son smells like a garbage strike during a heat wave, but are met with half-assed justifications and prescriptions for specialty soaps that ultimately do nothing. This is all set up quite quickly and with little perspective or guiding tone, merely providing a backdrop for the central plight of Mica (Douglas Smith), noting his inability to forge legitimate relationships and giving a superficial rationale for his instinct to retreat from the world.
Within moments, Mica is a teenager with an absent father and a deceased mother, swimming at the local pool whenever he's not giving guided tours of his house, which is a museum honouring Guillermo Garibai, the Mexican crooner. So that we have an idea about what Mica is thinking, there's also the introduction of a psychiatrist (Carrie-Anne Moss), which manifests in little more than a bit of romantic transference and exceptionally broad analyses of outsider psychology.
Unfortunately, since the observations about what it's like to be marginalized are cursory at best, there's very little dramatic tension or resulting emotional investment. This leaves the infrequent and painfully strained comedy to do the heavy lifting, which is problematic since it's unsure if it wants to be a dark comedy, making light of Mica's contextually devastating upbringing, or just a skewed view of a world that's just slightly adjacent — a hyperbolic, kitschy externalized projection of Mica's mental state — to reality. Resultantly, the tenuous romance between Mica and the overly amiable and mostly undefined Laura (Zoë Kravitz) serves as little more than routine thematic filler to remind us all to make lemonade when life hands us (smelly) lemons.
Given the collective peripheral elements that all lead back to the cultural diaspora that stems from being biracial — Mica is biracial, his love interest is of yet another race and the film itself is a Mexican-Canadian co-production — the funky aroma that our protagonist tries to mask with a car freshener seems to represent a variety of ways in which being marginalized is manifested. As such, the basic message of staying strong in the face of adversity isn't at all problematic or shortsighted in any way; it's just a tad anodyne, especially when accompanied by such diffident, ineffectual filmmaking.
The Boy Who Smells Like Fish isn't bad — in fact, it's very watchable — but it doesn't take any risks or have any real vision or consistency. Unlike its unique protagonist, there's nothing unique or even noteworthy about this film: everyone delivers serviceable performances, and the message is delivered clearly, but there's nothing beyond that to make it worth revisiting or even thinking about after the credits roll. If it were a fish, it would be tilapia.