You won’t want to look away from this FISH TANK (2009)

Posted by Stephen Jannise

WARNING!!! You’ve only got three more days to see one of the best new films of the past few years! Inexplicably, The Dobie is shoving out Andrea Arnold’s marvelous new film Fish Tank after only one week to make room for the Oscar Nominated Shorts programs, even though the Oscars have already been handed out. This all-too-brief stay in Austin won’t do much for Arnold’s visibility in our fair city, which should be much higher after her very fine, Academy Award-winning, 2003 short Wasp and her stunning debut feature Red Road, which I saw at the Lincoln Plaza Cinemas in Manhattan in 2007. I remember thinking Arnold could be one of the next big things in contemporary filmmaking. But that film was almost completely ignored by American audiences, and Fish Tank, which is her best work to date, looks set to suffer the same fate. What does this woman have to do to get noticed?

The film tells the story of fifteen-year-old Mia, who is beginning to feel trapped in an impoverished housing project neighborhood. Her mother, who clearly must have been almost Mia’s age when she gave birth to Mia, is frequently drunk and often forces Mia and her younger sister out of the house so she can party with her friends. Such a domestic situation has not done wonders for Mia’s social success, as she has grown to be a mischief-seeking troublemaker. At the beginning of the film, she is indefinitely expelled from school after headbutting one of her classmates, and she has to flee from several angry boys after she tries to free a horse that is chained up next to their trailer.

Clearly, not much is going right for Mia, so she often escapes to an abandoned apartment room in a nearby building to dance, her hobby of choice. After finding someone of age to buy her some cheap liquor, she goes to this room with her music and her booze and dances and drinks the day away. Taking a break, she stares out the window as she drains the last of her alcohol, looking down on the similarly depressed people milling about the streets below. Thus the title of the film; confined in this room, on the inside looking out, Mia not only doesn’t know how to get out but also wouldn’t know where to go. As far as the eye can see, the situation doesn’t seem to get better; things are shitty block after block.

She's going to be a Fly Girl on ''In Living Color.''

These dance scenes, with Mia bobbing and weaving to her hip-hop tunes, are reminiscent of Robert De Niro’s footwork in Raging Bull. In both cases, we see characters who seem lost in all areas of life except for dancing and boxing, respectively. When they get into their dance room/ring, the characters discover a vitality that they previously seemed incapable of achieving. And Katie Jarvis certainly brings a lot of vitality to the role of Mia. As it happens, Jarvis was herself a bit of a troublemaker before being cast in this film, and, like Mia’s mother, Jarvis became a mother at the age of sixteen. In an inspired bit of neo-realist casting, she was discovered by a casting agent causing a scene and arguing with a boyfriend on a train platform. The rest is history; will Mia be so lucky?

Arnold certainly does borrow many neo-realist techniques for the film. In addition to casting unknowns and non-professionals, she makes full use of her genuine locations. You need not know anything about lower-class living situations in England before seeing this film, because Arnold will make you understand just how hopeless and oppressive it can be. Mia obviously can’t afford a car, so we spend a lot of time walking with her from place to place in an expansive neighborhood that seems to have been thoughtlessly designed with car travel in mind. Luckily, Arnold’s director of photography Robbie Ryan manages somehow to find some optimism in these locations, occasionally allowing for moments of brightness and color to accentuate the idea that, even in the worst of situations, youth equals hope for the future. Why Arnold and Ryan decided to shoot the film in 1.33:1 is anyone’s guess.

Things do seem to pick up for Mia as the film progresses. She gets a callback for a dance audition, and, perhaps more thrillingly, her mother brings home a new beau, played by matinee-idol-in-training Michael Fassbender, fresh off of great performances as IRA martyr Bobby Sands in Hunger and a British film critic turned secret agent in Inglourious Basterds. She instantly becomes attracted to him, and he takes a shine to her as well. Is the kindness he shows her paternal in nature, or more sinister? And how will that dance audition play out? The final act of the film is astonishing, culminating in two scenes of quiet, heartbreaking beauty.

This is bad news.

Unlike Mia, Arnold never steps wrong, never makes a bad decision. Fish Tank is expertly constructed from start to finish, and Arnold’s talents as a writer and director are on full display. Going back to my initial question regarding what Arnold has to do to be noticed, her next film is a new adaptation of Wuthering Heights, starring the brooding Ed Westwick of Gossip Girl fame as Heathcliff. If that doesn’t do it, I don’t know what will.