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Fishbowl Wives is riddled with contradictions and inconsistencies, but at its core is rewarding drama – if perhaps a little unfit for a Valentine’s Day release.
This Fishbowl Wives review is spoiler-free.
Netflix has a sense of humor, right? On Valentine’s Day, the International Day of Romance and Love, they launched not one, but two international series about… infidelity and extramarital affairs. Ha! As my colleague oversees Devotion, A Story of Love and Desire, I fell in charge of covering Fishbowl Wives, an adaptation of Ryô Kurosawa’s popular manga Kingyo Tsuma about several women in a high-rise apartment building, all of whom, for different reasons, begin to break away from avert their marriages.
Those reasons are varied and often quite tragic, and over eight episodes the story twists and turns — while the audio often sways back and forth — as Fishbowl Wives tries to keep all of its ducks in line. The supposed protagonist is Sakura, who has become the shy, battered housewife of the salon owner Takuya after an accident. But a chance encounter with a pet shop owner named Haruto causes Sakura to reconsider her life through the thick glass of a goldfish bowl and see herself as the trapped little creature, too suffocated by circumstance to swim free. She takes her first step towards emancipation and then several more while several other stories interweave with her own to mixed effects.
This format is… unusual. The triangle dynamic between Sakura, Takuya, and Haruto is clearly the series’ central conflict, but there’s a plethora of supporting characters and plots that aren’t consistent in their theme or tone, and there doesn’t seem to be a particularly logical structure to how they’re contained . The fish and its bowl become a recurring metaphor in every story, and sometimes a literal psychic figure chimes in seemingly by accident, but planting these whimsical, anthological appendages into an otherwise compelling and uncomplicated story doesn’t exactly create a coherent whole.
Aside from some touch-and-go continuity, Fishbowl Wives also uses several repetitive gimmicks to get his point across, at least when his point is actually clear, which isn’t always the case. Women’s empowerment is obviously a goal, but it relies too heavily on the notion of men as rapists, controlling aggressors, and then sometimes trying to breed real affection out of the same foundation, so questioning what the show considers a violation and what it sometimes deems a man who is sexy and assertive too nebulous for the show’s own good. It also has a tendency to juxtapose scenes of serious human connection with sex scenes, as if to imply that one is meaningful while the other is easy. Still, there are so many sex scenes – the show literally starts with one – that you can get the feeling that in some cases she’s deliberately trying to tickle. A hypocritical “have-the-cake-and-eat-eat” vibe pervades.
Still, there’s some decent drama here. The performances are solid, the show is well shot and some of the topics raised are relevant and worthwhile. Granted, it’s an unusual series, but it’s sure to garner some fans — as well as some ardent critics — too. As always, I’m somewhere in the middle, so I’m making a very cautious recommendation. You might not watch it with your partner, though.
You can stream Fishbowl Wives exclusively on Netflix.
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