The Annihilation of Fish

Charles Burnett's 1999 American film brings together a Jamaican widower newly released from a mental institution and a former housewife with an imagined lover. The two move into the same boarding house in Los Angeles, and the landlady is at least as particular as they are. The film does not treat their conditions as illness. Fish wrestles with someone invisible, Poinsettia converses with a nineteenth-century composer, and neither tries to explain it to the other; the narrative makes that acceptance ordinary. James Earl Jones and Lynn Redgrave lead and the comedy comes entirely from their rhythm. When it was finished the film found no distribution and went unseen for years; its restoration and rerelease came much later. Who it's for: those who like Charles Burnett's cinema and unusual love stories. Who it's not for: viewers expecting a particular realism in the depiction of mental health; the film handles it in the register of a fable.