Fish Tank
August 4th 2010 22:05
Fish Tank 2009
Fish Tank begins with a familiar template, reminiscent of Loach and Leigh, but it doesn’t mean we’ve seen it all before and shouldn’t delve into it. Mia lives with her single working class mum and younger sister in a large decaying council estate maze in Essex. The landscape mostly, though not entirely, is distinguished by blank horizons and vestiges of vanished industries. Words are shrieked as they are felt without pauses for niceness. It is a world where people live too close to each other yet their lives are isolated and only linked by their mutual contempt and abrasion.
Mia is an aggressive, street-tough kid shaped by her with a tortured home life and tough surroundings. Her non-involved alcoholic mother only acknowledges her daughter by pushing her around and screaming epithets at her. Mia has a similar reciprocal relationship with her younger, almost-equally mouthy sister who matches Mia’s exclamations, calling her, ‘c**t face’ when Mia calls her, ‘fuck face’.
Mia’s physical and emotional self-defence exudes in most of her actions. In Mia’s first onscreen five minutes, she we see her call a friend’s dad a ‘c**t’ and head butt another girl. Constantly bored and contemptuous of her surroundings, Mia never ventures far from home until she spies a flyer saying, ‘Female Dancer Wanted’. This gives her the impetus to focus on something she feels really matters, hip-hop dancing. Lying down her CD player and speakers in an empty flat above her own, she practises her dance movements in preparation for her audition. She dances without joy, with a strong hardness with her hood over her head in the darkness. Throughout the film, dance is used as integral way for Mai to communicate and escape into. Indeed, it is an essential, delicately beautiful part of the almost soundless resolution between disaffected Mia and her mother.
Fish Tank - Katie Jarvis
Used to her mother’s contempt and lack of concern about her and her life, Mia is defensively surprised when her mother’s new boyfriend, Connor seems to notice and actually care about her. Connor is funny, sexy, confident and calm where everyone else appears clenched with hardened resentment. Mia’s quiet smiles show that she likes him, while he pays her more attention than anyone else in her life, praising her dancing, giving her a piggyback, even tucking her up in bed when she pretends to be asleep. Initially, Connor’s intentions are not clearly defined, he seems genuinely nice, especially supporting Mia’s ambitions to be a dancer yet his actions become concerning. Their relationship takes an unexpected and disquieting turn, but as always, director Arnold avoids any overt judgments or explanations. The tangled and increasingly complex relationship that develops between Mia and Connor is both disturbing and devastating, with a certain amount of empathy allowed for both characters.
Fish Tank - Michael Fassbender
This is Andrea Arnold’s second feature film that has again earned her the Jury Prize at the Cannes Film festival in 2009. Her debut film, ‘Red Road’ from 2006 also gained the same title. After 'Fish Tank' won the British Independent Film Award for Best Director of a British Independent Film, her work has since been likened to established names such as Michael Haneke and Lars von Trier.
It could be ascertained that the title is a metaphor for the way Mia feels helplessly confined in an environment where she just goes around and around with no chance of escape. While it sounds like this is a dismal tale, the blazing English sun adds some lightness interlinked with some humour. As with other films in the social realism vein, Fish Tank doesn’t conclude with a neat, mushy decision. All ends aren’t tightly tied up and the characters don’t morph into someone completely different. It deftly shows highlights how unexpectedly vulnerable the seemingly bolshy and aggressive teenagers who live in these housing estates can be.
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