Why ‘Go Fish’ Feels Like Memory

Written by Rose Troche and Guinevere Turner and directed by Troche, Go Fish (1994) doesn’t announce itself. It doesn’t rush to establish momentum or stakes, and it never quite points the viewer toward resolution. Scenes begin already in motion and end before anything has settled, as if the camera has wandered into conversations that were happening long before it arrived and will continue after it leaves. The effect isn’t casual. It feels deliberate — a film shaped around presence rather than progress.

Shot in black and white, the film avoids visual emphasis. Apartments, bars, kitchens, sidewalks — everything is rendered plainly, without flourish. The cinematography doesn’t guide emotion or signal importance. It observes. The camera stays close, but not insistent. What it records are people talking, often at length, not toward revelation but toward understanding, circling the same thoughts more than once.

At the center are Max and Ely, whose attraction develops almost entirely through conversation. There’s no inciting incident that forces them together, no obstacle engineered to keep them apart. Their relationship forms through talk: direct, awkward, analytical, sometimes defensive. Desire is named, questioned, reconsidered. Intimacy isn’t staged so much as spoken into existence, as shown in this clip from the film.

What matters is that this relationship never exists on its own. Friends are almost always nearby — listening, interrupting, offering opinions, drifting into their own stories. They aren’t there to advance the romance or complicate it. They’re simply present. The film treats friendship as a condition of life rather than a narrative function. Scenes rarely belong to just two people for long. The group remains part of the texture.

That social density changes how the film moves. The romance doesn’t have to prove itself against the world. It has to find a place within it. Conversations about dating, identity, expectations, and emotional risk happen openly, often without agreement. No voice is framed as correct. The film doesn’t argue. It listens.

What Go Fish consistently refuses to do is dramatize emotion. There are no heightened confrontations, no engineered climaxes. Even moments that could tip into tension are allowed to pass quietly. Discomfort is acknowledged without escalation. Hesitation is named without consequence. The film doesn’t require its characters to resolve their uncertainty in order to justify the time spent with them.

Structurally, the film advances by accumulation rather than progression. Scenes echo one another. Conversations return to familiar ground. Ideas about love, autonomy, and vulnerability repeat, shifting slightly depending on who’s speaking or where they’re spoken. Meaning doesn’t arrive through revelation. It gathers, gradually.

By the time the film ends, nothing has been settled. That absence is sometimes mistaken for a lack of purpose. It isn’t. It feels more like restraint. Go Fish resists the impulse to close emotional loops. It doesn’t promise permanence or frame connection as destiny. Relationships are allowed to exist without being turned into conclusions.

The dialogue is central to this effect. Characters speak with an awareness of themselves, sometimes commenting on their own behavior even as they repeat it. Thoughts feel provisional, as if they’re being tested aloud rather than delivered fully formed. Silence isn’t treated as failure. Pauses stay pauses. The film doesn’t hurry to fill space.

Because of this, Go Fish feels less like a story unfolding than something overheard. Its scenes resemble recollection more than narration — fragments, impressions, exchanges without hierarchy. Watching it can feel like remembering a time rather than witnessing an event, not because the film is nostalgic, but because it refuses to shape experience into peaks and resolutions.

The ending follows the same logic. It doesn’t conclude; it stops. There’s no final statement, no summary of meaning. What remains is a residue — the sense of having spent time with people thinking aloud in the presence of desire, uncertainty, and one another.

Watching Go Fish doesn’t feel like being led anywhere. It feels more like sitting with something and letting it end when it’s ready.