Film review: Fish Tank

A review of Fish Tank, directed by Andrea Arnold (2009)

One of the reassuring constants of contemporary culture is the enduring fondness of filmmakers in the UK for the realism and moral seriousness of the British New Wave. Perhaps what makes Andrea Arnold's work so arresting is not simply that it represents excellence in this field, but that the ‘angry young men' of the 1950s and 1960s are here replaced by an angry woman.

Fish Tank has many affinities with Arnold's 2006 Red Road, not least her choice of the rundown social housing estate as the lab bench upon which she dissects the putrid entrails of our post-Thatcherite society. By way of corrective treatment for their pathologies, the entire political class should be strapped down in cinema seats - A Clockwork Orange style - and forced to watch this film again and again until they admit that neither Labour nor Conservative parties have been able to address the squalid human existence that the film depicts. Fish Tank suggests that the ‘broken Britain' debate framed as Labour v. Conservative is too simplistic.

The film opens with Mia, Fish Tank's 15-year-old protagonist (played by Katie Jarvis, famously talent-spotted whilst arguing with her boyfriend at Tilbury railway station) aimlessly wandering around her estate, until she comes across a group of young girls performing a dance routine. We soon learn that Mia herself has aspirations to become a dancer, which helps us make some sense of why Mia feels compelled to make derogatory remarks about the girls and their dance moves. When one of the girls challenges her over this, Mia head-butts her, breaking her nose. Mia arrives back in her flat to find that her mother - who from her age and style of dress one immediately assumes is her elder sister - has caught wind of this development. The violent and expletive-laden interaction between the two sets the tone for their relationship.

Mia's mum Joanne (Kierston Wareing) tells Mia that she wanted to have her aborted, but "couldn't get an appointment". Joanne is looking forward to Mia's imminent departure from the house to a ‘special school' for troubled kids. And when Joanne organises a party at the flat for her friends - essentially a booze-fuelled orgy - Mia is told in no uncertain terms to keep out the way. But Mia has other ideas. Taking advantage of a woman who has lost her grip on her bottle of vodka on account of being sexually stimulated over the kitchen worktop, Mia heads back upstairs - bottle in hand - and drinks herself unconscious. It's clear that Joanne considers Mia an obstacle in every way. She is also - given that Joanne must have been 14 or 15 when she gave birth to Mia - a constant reminder of her own stolen youth.

The resentment and rivalry between Mia and her mother is heightened by the presence of Connor (Michael Fassbender) with whom Joanne is having an affair. Connor is charming, physically attractive - something of a rough diamond - and is seemingly kind and paternalistic towards Mia and her equally troubled younger sister. When he takes Joanne and the girls out for a day trip into the Essex countryside and they find momentary release in the light and air and the simplicity of catching a fish, one is tempted to concoct a narrative that sees Connor as a redeemer, capable of providing the stability and affection that the two girls so obviously crave. And yet if the imagery of the fish gasping for air on the riverbank, then impaled by Connor on a stick ("it's kinder that way") is a little forced, the way in which Arnold deals with the development of the relationship between Mia and Connor is extremely deft. At once attracted and repulsed by Connor, Arnold captures perfectly the feelings of desire and distrust that children of single mothers often feel towards the men that pass through their lives, and the dereliction of moral responsibility that so often accompanies sexual predation in these contexts. It's here that one is tempted to wonder whether or not a male director could have produced the same effect.

Mia is more than old enough to feel sexually attracted to Connor, and the extent to which she has already been exposed to sexuality - for example watching through the door as Connor has energetic intercourse with her mother, repeatedly banging her own bedroom door in anger, and to try to drown out the noise - reminds us just how fully Mia has been exposed to the world of the adult. But through Mia's dancing we also come to see her more childlike side. Practising the same routines over and over, Mia dreams of getting an audition to become a dancer; any kind of dancer, one assumes, so long as it offered her a path away from her present life and from the school to which she is supposed to be sent. The problem is that Mia isn't really very good at dancing.

In a remarkably obtuse review in the Daily Mail (‘More British miserabilism which no sane viewer would pay to watch') Chistopher Tookey thinks that Mia's rather average dancing is a fault of the director: Katie Jarvis hasn't been properly choreographed, which makes her "look foolish and delusional, like one of those really sad people at The X Factor auditions". The whole point, it seems to me, is that Mia's dancing is supposed to be plain and average. She is just doing what children do, putting on little shows, dancing and singing in the mirror. Children play act, they imitate and reinvent things they see around them, in this case the omnipresent gold chains, hot pants and gyrating buttocks emanating from the R&B station on TV. And yet Mia reinterprets these moves in a clunky, slightly innocent and noticeably desexualised way, almost as if she were just passing time in the playground. This is just one of the many subtle ways in which Arnold deals with the suspension of young people like Mia between childhood and adulthood.

Whilst Arnold's social realism leads to comparisons with Ken Loach and Mike Leigh, the more interesting development in Fish Tank is her treatment of the psychological effects of lost childhoods. In Mia, Arnold has created a character through whom she can extend her social critique into the domestic sphere and specifically the relations between mother and child (the father is inevitably absent, unnamed, unmentioned). Through the character of Joanne, Arnold has pinpointed something which is far more difficult for politicians to address, or even conceptualise: the terrible consequences of stolen childhoods for kids exposed to alcohol abuse, drugs, sex and violence by parents who themselves grew up too quickly, and who often cannot help but reproduce the same psychological effects in their own children.

This is a brilliant (though not flawless) film. There isn't much of a plot, and yet Arnold's eye for detail, her apparent intimacy with suffering coupled with a rare talent for conveying the poetics of the everyday (the penultimate scene in which Mia, her mother and her younger sister dance in unison to Nas's ‘Life's a bitch and then you die' is especially moving) makes Fish Tank unwaveringly engaging. Don't go and see it if you fancy a cheerful night out. But if you enjoy that peculiar fulfilment that comes from the disturbing recognition of certain truths about the human condition, and you appreciate fine cinema in whatever guise it comes, this is a film for you.