By Mark Demetrius

As kitchen-sink realists have been reminding us since the sixties, life on English council estates can be very bleak indeed. The one in Essex where fifteen-year-old Mia (Katie Jarvis) lives is no exception, and the grimness is compounded by her lack of friends and the combative atmosphere at home. In a trope that stops just the right side of cliche, she seems to identify with a horse that’s tied up in a nearby field. Mia’s mother, Joanne (Kierston Wareing), regularly drinks herself insensible, and resents the presence of her daughters – Mia and her tough-talking little sister, Tyler (Rebecca Griffiths) – if not their very existence.

This is the premise for writer-director Andrea Arnold’s (who previously helmed the eye catching indie drama Red Road) melancholy story. The bitter and frustrated Mia dreams of becoming a break dancing star, but thankfully this is not a trite sub-Billy Elliot redemption saga. “She’s a loose cannon,” Andrea Arnold told FilmInk in 2009. “All sorts of things could happen with her because she flies off the handle. She’s got a temper and a lot of energy, and that naturally brings about an uncertainty about what will happen.” mc

Life becomes a good deal less cheerless for Mia’s mum, Joanne – and potentially so for the kids as well – when she hooks up with charming and affable Irish security guard Connor (Michael Fassbender). What follows is a sustained exercise in escalating sexual tension. Given the expletive-sodden brusqueness and intensity of everyone’s conversation, it’s also a reasonably subtle one, with wariness and attraction constantly jostling for supremacy. “I just love characters that are difficult,” Arnold told FilmInk. “I’m very interested in characters that are not immediately likeable when you meet them. I’m very interested in the people that we normally ignore or don’t think about or perhaps do things that we don’t understand. In life, we judge a lot of people. If you followed almost any human being for long enough, you would have empathy for them and you would understand their humanity, no matter what.”

Fish Tank is well shot and uniformly well-acted, but especially so by Katie Jarvis and Michael Fassbender. It definitely gets us in, and becomes inexorably more tense and dramatic as it progresses. There are moments of particular hypnotic power towards the end, and they somehow mirror the rhythmic tone of the film’s hip hop and soul music. Fish Tank is highly recommended.

Shares:

Leave a Reply