Bird's Eye View

BEV Reviews Fish Tank

Fish Tank, directed by Andrea Arnold

On Saturday BEV managed to catch Fish Tank, one of the three women-directed features screening in competition at Cannes (alongside Isabel Coixet’s Maps of the Sounds of Tokyo and Jane Campion’s Bright Star – more on that coming soon). BEV has been a supporter of director Andrea Arnold since screening her short Dog in November 2002, at the first ever Birds Eye View event! In 2005 we were the first festival to screen her Oscar-winning follow-up, Wasp, and welcomed Andrea for a Q&A just after receiving the award. And in 2006 Andrea spoke at a BEV event about the experience directing her first feature, the acclaimed Red Road, so – to put it mildly – BEV has been getting just a little excited about feasting our eyes on Fish Tank…

Fifteen year old Mia’s life is turned on its head when her Mum brings home a new boyfriend.

Opening with a council estate and a swift head-butt, Fish Tank thrusts us straight into classic Arnold territory. 15 year-old Mia, a little ball of rage, bombs around doing her best impression of a tomboy tough girl, and scorns her peers for their dance routines, while behind closed doors secretly obsessing over her own. Arnold is characteristically sharp on the sexualization and commodification of young girls, from the rolling borderline pornographic music videos, makeover reality shows and footballers’ wives fly-on-the-wall TV which constantly hover in the frame, to Mia’s unabashedly promiscuous mother, Joanne, who bumps and grinds in front of Mia and her younger sister Tyler, and welcomes in fling after fling through a revolving door leading to free-for-all binge drinking parties in their run-down flat.

Fish Tank, directed by Andrea Arnold

Joanne’s latest love interest, Connor (played with great subtlety by Michael Fassbender), is introduced as a shady character when he spends a gratuitous few minutes watching pyjama-clad Mia (thinking herself alone) aping the bikini-clad dancers in an R&B video before announcing his presence and introducing himself as Mia’s mum’s new ‘friend’. Like Mia, though, whose temperament yo-yos from shockingly violent to tender and from gauche to gobby teen and back again, her relationship with Connor is far from black and white. While her emotionally immature, mother does her best to block her daughters’ access to her new live-in lover, Connor is keen to play the father figure to Mia and Tyler, taking them on a country drive for some impromptu fishing and introducing them to his favourite music. He sees clean through Mia’s defensive front and boosts her rock-bottom self-confidence, encouraging her to develop her talent for dance and to respond to a call for local freestyle auditions. Yet his motives are – as is made clear from his first encounter with Mia – far from purely paternal, and for the first hour Arnold’s film dances ominously around the parameters of abuse and affection, sensitively coloured by Mia’s inevitably confused perspective – a hugely dynamic performance from non-professional newcomer Katie Jarvis, who Arnold discovered, fittingly enough, mid-shouting match on a tube platform.

Andrea Arnold

Visually, the film is more reminiscent of Arnold’s shorts than her highly stylised, CCTV-filtered feature debut Red Road. The camera is almost all (if not exclusively) handheld, and the animal motifs and themes which characterised Wasp and Dog come thick and fast in Fish Tank. From the dilapidated, colourful jungle mural that extends throughout Mia’s flat, to a striking Mickey Mouse-shadow on a tower-block wall (which is, ingeniously, revealed to be the form of a nifty break-dancer with a sizeable afro), to the graphically speared fish Connor catches and cats having makeovers on TV, animals are all about. At their best, they are used to visually surreal and psychologically revealing effect: as when, in an early scene, lonely Mia, almost literally letting off steam, stumbles across a tied-up shabby old horse on a desolate caravan site. Not only does this come as a totally unexpected image in the grim urban landscape – and an arrestingly beautiful juxtaposition – but the patchy grey coat of the horse is almost a perfect match to kindred Mia’s marl-grey tracksuit.

As heavy on style as it is on substance, Fish Tank is brimful of visual inspiration, compelling characters and keen social observation, whilst a sparkling script (with most of the wit spewing from 8 year-old, Tyler’s potty-mouth – played by the excellent Rebecca Griffiths, who blows In the Loop’s Peter Capaldi out of the water for profanity) makes for effortlessly entertaining grittiness. If any homegrown Cannes entry this year best represents the state of the nation, this is England.