Cast: Katie Jarvis, Michael Fassbender

Director: Andrea Arnold

Screenplay: Andrea Arnold

Running time: 2 hrs 03 mins

Genre: Drama



CRITIQUE:


Andrea Arnold’s sophomore feature Fish Tank is both gruelling and astonishing to watch. It is largely a film about the bleak and the banal, a 15-year old potty-mouthed teenager living in an equally expletive-ridden, booze-fuelled sinkhole Essex estate, and whilst it’s certainly not the first time we’re lobbed at with a British kitchen-sink drama (try browsing through Ken Loach or Mike Leigh) but Arnold’s voice and vision are thoroughly compelling that it’s hard to imagine this without winning 2009’s Grand Prix in Cannes.


In Fish Tank, there are neither angel fishes nor gold-hearted Nemos but only sharks that prey on each other, especially with the weaker ones. So its heroine is compelled to turn into a villain to defend herself from the vicious mauling around her. Dancer-wannabe Mia is entrapped in this gloomy council estate with an ex-prostitute for Mum and a little scumbag as a younger sister. This is a place where heads aren’t used to think but to verbally assault or headbutt somebody else vile. Friendships are betrayed, an alliance always shift, and even Mum, when not guzzling gin and sucking up cigars, brings a new boyfriend home – there’s nobody to depend on so Mia is better off wandering alone. But all is not entirely washed with grimness. Mia (newcomer Katie Jarvis in a fiery, powerful, intense central performance), despite of her aggressive nature is such a well-drawn character that can render one brimming with empathy.


Teetering between adolescence and womanhood, she’s in a state of inner turmoil that tries to grasp the significance of her existence and her sexuality. Her dancing practices in small, cramped room overlooking the sprawl of Essex is a touching idiom of how smothered and claustrophobic her life is despite of the vast openness. This search of one’s self comes to full tilt when he meets her mother’s new boyfriend, a simmering, charismatic yet dangerous Wickes-worker Connor (a magnetic turn by Michael Fassbender), whose scenes with any trace of bare skin is sensually captured by Arnold’s camerawork from the perspective of Mia. In fact, the film is emotionally alive between Mia and Connor’s interplay, making the scenes electric with tension. His tenderness, which veers from paternalistic to sometimes harbouring menace, baffles Mia as she finds herself gently yielding to his charms. She becomes wordless and gentle, perfectly articulated by Arnold’s camera giving the film a sense of poetic realism.


VERDICT:

If Fish Tank doesn’t break your heart, then you probably have no heart at all. This is compelling, intense, authentic, compassionate and poignant British realism at its supreme height. Arnold directs with grit, grace and poetic justice, supplemented with Jarvis’ ferocious yet achingly human central performance and Fassbender’s mesmeric turn. Rank this one along with the celluloid of Loach and Leigh for vivid social studies.



RATING: A-