Fish Tank (2009)
On a rundown Essex estate a messed-up 15-year-old girl's life is thrown into confusion when her mum starts seeing a mysterious new man. The second film from Red Road director Andrea Arnold, starring Katie Jarvis and Michael Fassbender
Andrea Arnold's second film is another haunting note from the UK's margins. As with her debut Red Road, Fish Tank's dead calm surface conceals a well of eerie anxiety and inappropriate erotic tension. Like the rundown estates and grubby wastelands in which it unfolds, Arnold's is a form of filmmaking grounded in empty spaces - in the characters' lives, the gaps between the characters, and in the way story itself is told.
Mia (Katie Jarvis) is a 15-year-old girl living on an Essex estate with her sisters and still-young mother Joanne (Kierston Wareing). Excluded from school, getting into fights and sharing her mother's appetite for booze, Mia finds solace dancing alone to hip-hop in an empty flat on the estate. Then a new man mysteriously appears in her mother's life - the charismatic, enigmatic and physically compelling Conor (Michael Fassbender.) Taking Joanne and the girls on drives into the countryside, catching fish with his bare hands and paying tender attention to Mia, Conor seems too good to be true. And so, it turns out, he is. Even as Joanne pins all her hopes for a better life onto Conor, so Conor's relationship with Mia becomes queasily sexual - an attitude Mia does nothing to dispel. Immature, belligerent and trapped, Mia becomes both the victim and the perpetrator in a cycle of unspoken resentment.
The slow sweep of Arnold's camera across the glittering Essex skyline suggests an episode of 'EastEnders' directed by Antonioni, but she's also precisely attentive to the details by which her characters' relationships evolve. A boozy party in Joanna's flat provides Mia with some freedom of her own: to snoop unnoticed through her mother's bedroom. Arnold's tightly observant eye is in sharp contrast to the ambiguous tone that governs these relationships. For more than half the film the outcome of Conor and Mia's relationship remains anxiously uncertain. When finally the situation is made explicit, Fish Tank is almost uncomfortably non-judgemental.
Andrea Arnold isn't the only British filmmaker dragging old school gritty realism towards a new form of cloudy unreality. Better Things and Helen both scoured England's dirty old towns in search of strange new perspectives on ordinary tragedy. All these films have drawn their casts from the local community, but none have found an actor quite as natural as Katie Jarvis, whom Arnold first encountered on Tilbury Town station having an argument with her boyfriend. A powerful acknowledgement of impotence, an articulate expression of blankness - Jarvis gives such a raw and unaffected performance that you wonder if, like David Bradley in Kes, she might never be able to match it. The counterweight is Michael Fassbender, a legitimate star after Hunger and Inglourious Basterds, but appropriately inscrutable as the man who enters and then exits Mia's life via a door he wasn't supposed to open.
Measured as the first half is, as one sad climax gives way to another a new sense of urgency emerges. It's at this point that Fish Tank achieves the eerie intensity of Red Road as Mia's status and motives are modified. The characters are presented with minimal context - all we know is what we see - yet their interaction is so closely observed that the drama feels almost shamefully intimate. A couple of sex scenes are comparatively coy, but the implications - as in life - keep on shuddering through the story.
Viewers with long memories will recall the Dogme 95 movement - the school of European filmmaking which revoked all dramatic licence: films made under its aegis were denied, among many other things, any form of incidental music. Red Road was made under the auspices of Dogme's Dano-Scottish wing, The Advance Party. Fish Tank adheres to the spirit if not the letter of that movement, but music is in its blood. Dancing provides Mia with her only hope of salvation and her tune, significantly, is Bobby Womack's melancholic version of 'California Dreamin''. A tragic-comic shuffle between Mia and her mother - to 'Life's A Bitch' by Nas - is wonderfully listless in its execution yet powerfully articulate in what it says about the film's women and their world.
As for the title - nothing that's free here survives, including a fish and a very symbolic white horse. Read one way, the conclusion allows for the possibility of a happy future for Mia. If there's a message though, it's that no one's getting out, but at least a tank is bigger than a bowl.
This quietly intense, strikingly shot coming-of-age drama establishes Andrea Arnold as a lyrical chronicler of marginalised Britain.
This review originally appeared at Film4.com
Mia (Katie Jarvis) is a 15-year-old girl living on an Essex estate with her sisters and still-young mother Joanne (Kierston Wareing). Excluded from school, getting into fights and sharing her mother's appetite for booze, Mia finds solace dancing alone to hip-hop in an empty flat on the estate. Then a new man mysteriously appears in her mother's life - the charismatic, enigmatic and physically compelling Conor (Michael Fassbender.) Taking Joanne and the girls on drives into the countryside, catching fish with his bare hands and paying tender attention to Mia, Conor seems too good to be true. And so, it turns out, he is. Even as Joanne pins all her hopes for a better life onto Conor, so Conor's relationship with Mia becomes queasily sexual - an attitude Mia does nothing to dispel. Immature, belligerent and trapped, Mia becomes both the victim and the perpetrator in a cycle of unspoken resentment.
The slow sweep of Arnold's camera across the glittering Essex skyline suggests an episode of 'EastEnders' directed by Antonioni, but she's also precisely attentive to the details by which her characters' relationships evolve. A boozy party in Joanna's flat provides Mia with some freedom of her own: to snoop unnoticed through her mother's bedroom. Arnold's tightly observant eye is in sharp contrast to the ambiguous tone that governs these relationships. For more than half the film the outcome of Conor and Mia's relationship remains anxiously uncertain. When finally the situation is made explicit, Fish Tank is almost uncomfortably non-judgemental.
Andrea Arnold isn't the only British filmmaker dragging old school gritty realism towards a new form of cloudy unreality. Better Things and Helen both scoured England's dirty old towns in search of strange new perspectives on ordinary tragedy. All these films have drawn their casts from the local community, but none have found an actor quite as natural as Katie Jarvis, whom Arnold first encountered on Tilbury Town station having an argument with her boyfriend. A powerful acknowledgement of impotence, an articulate expression of blankness - Jarvis gives such a raw and unaffected performance that you wonder if, like David Bradley in Kes, she might never be able to match it. The counterweight is Michael Fassbender, a legitimate star after Hunger and Inglourious Basterds, but appropriately inscrutable as the man who enters and then exits Mia's life via a door he wasn't supposed to open.
Measured as the first half is, as one sad climax gives way to another a new sense of urgency emerges. It's at this point that Fish Tank achieves the eerie intensity of Red Road as Mia's status and motives are modified. The characters are presented with minimal context - all we know is what we see - yet their interaction is so closely observed that the drama feels almost shamefully intimate. A couple of sex scenes are comparatively coy, but the implications - as in life - keep on shuddering through the story.
Viewers with long memories will recall the Dogme 95 movement - the school of European filmmaking which revoked all dramatic licence: films made under its aegis were denied, among many other things, any form of incidental music. Red Road was made under the auspices of Dogme's Dano-Scottish wing, The Advance Party. Fish Tank adheres to the spirit if not the letter of that movement, but music is in its blood. Dancing provides Mia with her only hope of salvation and her tune, significantly, is Bobby Womack's melancholic version of 'California Dreamin''. A tragic-comic shuffle between Mia and her mother - to 'Life's A Bitch' by Nas - is wonderfully listless in its execution yet powerfully articulate in what it says about the film's women and their world.
As for the title - nothing that's free here survives, including a fish and a very symbolic white horse. Read one way, the conclusion allows for the possibility of a happy future for Mia. If there's a message though, it's that no one's getting out, but at least a tank is bigger than a bowl.
This quietly intense, strikingly shot coming-of-age drama establishes Andrea Arnold as a lyrical chronicler of marginalised Britain.
This review originally appeared at Film4.com
