Andrea Arnold masterfully handles Fish Tank, a film of gritty British realism that captivates and depresses, but does not wear itself out trying to rend your heartstrings. The soundtrack is minimal and is most often comprised of various background noises and the cockney-laced vocal outburst of the oft-volatile Mia (Katie Jarvis), a fifteen-year-old who is ostracized by her peers and recently dismissed from school.
Note: Appropriately enough, rumor has it that Katie Jarvis had never acted before, and Arnold decided to cast her as Mia when she saw Jarvis fighting with her boyfriend on a train station platform.
Mia’s home life is that only in semantics; rather, it is an apartment stacked among many apartments where laundry hangs over the balcony, empty beer bottles serve as hallway decoration, and other inhabited, dilapidating tenements compose the view from the windows.
Mia’s only refuge is an abandoned apartment somewhere above her own where she sets up her Discman and portable Radio Shack-style speakers to play hip-hop beats and dance tracks to which she practices the same dance routine on end — badly. As our introduction to Mia, this scene recalls a number of movies that have introduced an angst-ridden teen who is able to rise above her own limitations through the cathartic power of dance (Save the Last Dance, Step Up, Footloose, Flashdance, Staying Alive, You Got Served, etc.) and while these movies are fine for what they are, Fish Tank is not one of them. Mia does not dance for a catharsis, and while she’s passionate about dancing, it doesn’t serve as a step out of her ghetto. Instead, dancing signifies her reluctant emulation of Joanne (Kierston Weiring), the abusive, lushy, licentious mother whom she loathes.
In Fish Tank, the faux-flaxen mother is not the reason they are in the ghetto, but the character who can’t do anything to get them out of the ghetto besides finding a variety of potential suitors in hopes of clinging on like a lamprey to be transported to a place only seen on television. This parasitic aspiration seems to come to fruition when she brings home Connor (Michael Fassbender), a thirty-something man who has a natural paternal instinct and treats both Mia and her younger sister Tyler (Rebecca Griffiths) with a gentle, nurturing hand, trying to include them in familial activities – on a day that Joanne and Conner plan a road trip, he invites Mia and Tyler to tag along, much to the chagrin of Joanne.
Because of his demeanor, Mia quickly develops an attraction for Conner, primarily because her bleak situation is void of compassion and encouragement – but also because she sees Conner in the same way that Joanne does: a means to an end, which ultimately leads her to a rather disturbing sexual encounter that transforms Conner from father figure to pedophile. The sex is consensual, but for Mia it is driven by her desire for a compassionate father-figure that she mistakes for “love.”
In the morning, Conner is gone, his suitcase is missing, Joanne is in tears, and Mia chases after him, finds his home, and from there, the audience knows what will happen before the third act climax, completely trapped in the fifteen year old consciousness of desparation and heartbreak. Not wanting to give too much away, I will simply suggest that the third act illustrates the value of desire in a destitute life, and the eye needed to discern between an object of true desire and illusion.
The winner of the Cannes’ Jury Prize this year, Fish Tank does not end with a audience-revving dance-off; rather the dancing theme culminates in a transition from a moment in an erotic, semen-stained club to a familial moment that fosters self-realization and ultimate sadness that previews Mia escaping her surroundings. To where, we know, to what, we are as oblivious as she, but Fish Tank also speaks to an ever-individualizing world where the self has become the most important commodity one can secure, even if it means painfully watching your younger sister through the rear of window of a car that she chases is vain, slowing to catch her breath before turning back to the whirlpool of dysfunction and her soul-sucking mother.
DYL MAG Score: 8
