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Fish Tank (2009)

Director: Andrea Arnold

Time Out rating

Average user rating

21 reviews

Synopsis

Arnold’s second film builds on her Oscar-winning short ‘Wasp’ and follows a girl whose mother brings home a stranger promising riches.

Movie review

From Time Out London

Read our interview with the director here.

I can understand why some people might recoil at the thought of another British film set on a council estate. Is it worthy? Condescending? Grim? Is it more evidence of a young filmmaker awkwardly exercising their Mike Leigh/Ken Loach fetishes?

Well, banish your fears: Andrea Arnold’s follow-up to ‘Red Road’ is a film that brilliantly and sensitively buzzes with life and offers its very own take on our world and our city. It delivers in spades attitude, humour, sadness, love, anger and hope – all wrapped up in a way of telling stories that is very much the director’s own. It’s realism, but it has an intimacy, an immediacy and a dash of poetry that offers a new spin on familiar territory.

Arnold has a keen eye for the border between danger and fulfilment when it comes to sexual feelings, and here she trains that eye on one vulnerable but strong adolescent teenage girl, Mia (Katie Jarvis), who you can’t help but feel for and understand – even after we watch her call a friend’s dad a ‘cunt’ and headbutt another girl so that the blood pours down her face. And that’s just the first five minutes.

Mia lives in a flat in Essex, near the Thames estuary, with her mum Joanne (Kierston Wareing) and her little sister Tyler (Rebecca Griffith). Mia calls her little sis ‘fuck face’ and little sis calls her ‘cunt face’ back. The TV blares out reality shows and makeover programmes. Outside, Arnold’s camera sucks up the territory on which she films; flats, busy roads, flyovers, scraps of land and suburban shop parades all lend a strong sense of place without any sense of gawking or romanticising.

This is Mia’s world and there it is: it can sometimes look ugly, sometimes look beautiful. Arnold and DoP Robbie Ryan shoot in the unusual 1.33:1 aspect ratio, so the screen is almost square, but ‘Fish Tank’ feels more like a series of personal Polaroids than TV, the glare of the sun often dancing across the lens in the manner of home snapshots.

Nothing about all this feels miserable. It helps that Arnold tells her tale at the height of summer so that the sun is always shining. It also helps that Arnold’s way of presenting Mia to us is to stay close to her at all times, to show us her world from her point of view. Crucially, we’re there, alone with Mia, when she regularly decamps to an empty flat and practices her hip hop dance moves. We know there’s more to Mia than antagonism and kneejerk violence and we’re curious about what’s going on in this girl’s head.

We’re there, too, when her mum brings home a man, Connor (Michael Fassbender), who is soon living with them, doing the washing-up with his top off and taking them for a drive. Mia’s smiles show that she likes him, while he pays her more attention than anyone else in her life, praising her dance moves, giving her a piggyback, even tucking her up in bed when she pretends to be asleep.

Their relationship takes unusual, even alarming turns, but always Arnold avoids obvious judgements, obvious explanations. Hers is an intimate drama of grey areas and all the better and more thoughtful – and thought-provoking – for it.

Read our interview with the director here.

Author: Dave Calhoun 2009-09-08 10:36:45

Time Out London Issue 2038, 10-16 Sept 2009

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User reviews of this film

v.jones said...

Posted on Oct 13 2009 16:35 Went on a 2nd Date to watch this, the woman I went with had a 15 and a 13 year old daughter, didn't go on a 3rd date!

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KP said...

Posted on Oct 11 2009 14:24 Simply wonderful. Unbelievable acting debut from Katie Jarvis and excellent perfomances from the rest of the cast. This is contemporary British cinema ..with bite ! Hats off to Andrea Arnold. Easily one of my favourite films of recent times.

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Ian said...

Posted on Oct 07 2009 23:03 Oy, Leigh, get your coat, and take your faux working class with you. This is the real deal. Heartbreaking, funny and touching, Kate Jarvis is absolutely phenomenal. Best British film for years. Incredible use of Essex, fabulous camera work, really creative incorporation of music into the film. Andrea Arnold, damn you, you made me cry.

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John said...

Posted on Sep 28 2009 16:08 Katie Jarvis is brilliant and so is the film congratulations to Andrea Arnold.

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Rob said...

Posted on Sep 26 2009 08:32 I think that this film has alot in common with the films of the Dardennes brothers - so if you are not already familiar with these other filmmakers, Claire, then I would certainly recommend them to you.

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claire said...

Posted on Sep 26 2009 00:09 Amazing, intense, real and thought provoking. I need the names of more gritty films like this so i can say goodbye to watching overdone predictable and easy blockbusters.....wow!!!

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Phil Ince said...

Posted on Sep 23 2009 17:12 This is a bit of failure, isn't it? Though there are 2 wonderful moments. The sisters' loving goodbyes: "I hate you" "I hate you, too" And the farewell to the mother where all three members of the family dance silently and in unison together. A few really great moments in a film that varies between ordinary and weak.
The climax is daft and laboured, I thought, because of the script on one hand and the direction on the other. What 8 year old child who’s been entirely silent whilst dragged half a mile over scrub land would suddenly pipe up: "OK, you're starting to scare me now?" When the non-swimmer teen is wrestling with the child on the bank of an estuary bank, there were what seemed to be interminable shots of teen being kicked by child. For all the suspense the scene had, it might as well have been accompanied by : "Stop kicking me or I'll throw you in the water. I'll throw you in the water if you don't stop kicking me. You'll be going in the water if you don't stop kicking me. Kick me one more time and I'll throw you in the water." It’s endless and could have been accompanied by a intermittent blacked-out captions reading: “Remember: teen can’t swim.” The children's performances and the dialogue for them isn't all that great or convincing. There is something already a bit dodgy about adults getting kids to use extreme language for them whether or not it's for a work of fiction.

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Rob said...

Posted on Sep 17 2009 00:47 Great Film !! With sensitive issues dealt with in a discerning and engaging manner. And my only minor criticism is that it seemed to become a bit too 'plot-heavy' during the final quarter of the film - in a way which seemed to stop it from fully-exploiting the foundations which had been developed.

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Rach said...

Posted on Sep 15 2009 22:28 Fabulous film, with the best camera work I've seen in years. I'm far from a teenager, but it brought back all those grim and great bits of being that age. Andrea Arnold you rock!

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Jo said...

Posted on Sep 14 2009 10:23 This was a really good film and I found it interesting, Katie Jarvis is, indeed, good as Mia, but one suspects she is very nuch playing to type. She's still young and, as I understand it, without formal training. In my view, the real challenge for an actor lies in playing a character very different from the actor's own, and one suspects Katie Jarvis would struggle with, for example, period drama.

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Cath said...

Posted on Sep 13 2009 11:26 "As far as I am concerned, council estates often provide good locations for filmmaking - the kind of people who live on them are often very direct and upfront - which makes them a good subject matter for filmmaking, regardless of how people are judged in other ways." I agreed with your initial challenge as to why a film set on a council estate needs to be defended. But then I found this comment both patronising and a generalisation.
Anyway, I'm off to see the film this evening....

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Lingdada said...

Posted on Sep 13 2009 08:23 Are we not so bored by yet another predictable,cliched written,dreary movie featuring council estate trailer park trash?Drug addled,promiscuous,grimy,morbid,with their unforgiveably tedious lives, it's hardly a fresh movie idea? But I suppose the 'Lolita' scenes became squalid late night entertainment for the Production staff! Hope the Lottery Fund didn't finance this drudge!

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Paul - SW11 said...

Posted on Sep 11 2009 23:03 Yes a must see film, goes beyond Somers Town and trains don't figure. Some uncomfortable moments such as the child abduction and not sure why the police were absent from that part of the story. Then the lead is 15 which the police would be equally interested in, so some aspects of the story is simplified. However, this is a very good film and regular film goers should put this on their list to see either now or on dvd. Great soundtrack and well used in the context of the film. In fact the more I think about it, the more I loved this film, so a rare five stars. BTW, no CGI, no 3D, just a damn good story and acting which is what I really really want!

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dave calhoun said...

Posted on Sep 09 2009 14:07 "As far as I am concerned, council estates often provide good locations for filmmaking - because the kind of people who live on them are often very direct and upfront - which makes them a good subject matter for filmmaking"
Rob - I agree, let's hope lots of people give it a chance.
Best
Dave

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Rob said...

Posted on Sep 09 2009 12:48 I appreciate your point, Dave - and the fact that you are just anticipating a prejudice which you are commonly exposed to. I just thought that the review was too defensive.
As far as I am concerned, council estates often provide good locations for filmmaking - because the kind of people who live on them are often very direct and upfront - which makes them a good subject matter for filmmaking, regardless of how people are judged in other ways. And I am really looking forward to watching this film - which is why your review seemed misdirected, and too focussed on a specific group.

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