MVFF32: 'Fish Tank'

British writer-director Andrea Arnold took the film world by storm with her feature debut Red Road, a singularly realistic if slightly spooky meditation on loss, grief, and the female psyche set in Glasgow's notorious Red Road flats and featuring actors supplied by Lars Von Trier's experimental Advance Party film project. Her second feature, Fish Tank, opening in next week's Mill Valley Film Festival, considers the even more complex territory of dysfunctional family dynamics and the way in which they distort and stifle human, specifically female, development. Set in a bleak and decaying housing project in Essex, the film works sociological territory closer to home for the Dartford-born director, and it shows; the look and feel is grittier, more authentic than any of the social-realist dramas it could be compared to, more powerful by far than anything by Mike Leigh, for example, whose films are descending further and further into a pit of sentimentalized 'ordinary' heroics, and outflanking the much more gloves-off Nil by Mouth which, remarkable though that film was, cannot match the depth and subtlety of Arnold's treatment.

The film spotlights newcomer Katie Jarvis as Mia, the sullen adolescent child of a desperately indifferent mother, Joanne, played by Keirston Wareing. Recently expelled from school, alienated from her friends and drifting in and out of the chaotic, abusive home, Mia is rigid with disappointment and pain, locked up behind a wall of disgust occasionally demolished by fits of defiance. For all her despicable qualities, the phenomenally bad mother Joanne is clearly reeling in a sort of hell of her own, a no-exit loop of hyper-sexualized immaturity which conditions the developing predicament of her daughter. This is where Arnold's compassionate understanding of damaged feminine psyche comes into its own. Joanne's retarded, narcissistic sexual identity remains fixed at a level barely above that of her 15 year-old daughter; she is incapable of assuming the responsibilities that come with motherhood, and so leaves both her daughters pathetically exposed to the sort of sexual predation that no doubt infected her own childhood. What we see in the mother-daughter dynamic is a snapshot of one sick, malfunctioning feminine ego at war with itself, dividing at a traumatic point of entry into two armed camps, the rejecting, defiant adolescent whose ignorance leads her to reach for love in the wrong place, and the defeated, slatternly woman whose damaged sexuality condemns her to a life of hopeless, eternal return. If we despise Joanne and root for Mia, we miss the point, for Joanne is Mia on some crucial level. This is how dysfunctional dynamics operate over generations. Other filmmakers have trodden this path, but Arnold does it with exceptional assurance, confidently walking a line between truth and sensation. There are no villains, only victims who enter moral stasis. There are no rapes, no knock-down, drag-out fights, no murders or other catastrophes, though the film is constantly skirting these conventions. The character of Connor, Joanne's boyfriend who encourages the affection of Mia and then betrays it one night on the couch while her mother is passed out upstairs, is sensitively played (by Michael Fassbender) as a gentle, humorous, attractive man whose kindness to the family is like a tank of oxygen come at a critical moment. His sexual advance to Mia proceeds according to the inexorable logic of the family, quietly, inevitably. It is as though the family is one body, expanding and contracting with Joanne's short-lived love affairs. Nobody escapes the scenario, nobody gets to define a self that is distinct from the whole. Hence the fish tank analogy, which I think denotes no escape.


For all that, the film is strangely hopeful, or at the very least, ambiguous. Its rigorous authenticity puts us in mind of what we know, experientially, to be true - that people can and do break negative patterns and escape their conditioned legacies. Mia's courage and sometimes outrageous acts of defiance point to a spirit which might be capable of achieving this. And the film's beautiful photography is a subtle reminder in itself of something slightly to one side of the grim facts, something delicate, displaced, but existent nevertheless. We might call this thing hope, if only because it is beautiful. Shots of wind-ravaged grass, or twilit, empty rooms where Mia dances by herself, of brilliant, light-filled shirts on the washing line, or the crenellated edge of a shell in a stirred wind-chime, all speak to this dimension of possibility. But it has to said that hope is more of a spectre than a real presence, perhaps conjured from a girl's imagination in order that its betrayal be rendered visible. This is the heartbreaking aspect of Mia's trajectory, her will to escape, her innocent, ignorant, absolute need to love and be loved, barely conscious of itself, groping blindly in a shrunken, booby-trapped world. There are metaphors that suggest complete hopelessness - the skewering of the fish on the river bank, the death of the traveller's horse - and then there are scenes of such poignant, breathtaking redemptive force near the end of the film, when Mia seeks revenge and encounters how close she is coming to a point of no return, that clearly reveal the potential in this embattled, confused, and lonely character. The scene where Mia takes Connor's small child into the fields and nearly loses her confounds narrative expectation in every way, cleaving so closely to the truth of its character's desperate state of mind it exposes the viewer's own conventional assumptions about what is about to happen, and what, to the filmmaker's credit, doesn't happen. It is one of cinema's extraordinary moments to be sure. Arnold's flawless decisions about where to take her characters and where not to take them brings her vision right into the center of our own similar lives. We are manipulated by cinema so often we hardly know it is happening until a director like this comes along and appeals to the terrible drama of the ordinary, our ordinary. Because most of us Thank God don't really know much about rapes and murders and such, but we do know the sort of blunt, relentless injuries real life can inflict; the raised temperature of family dysfunction, the blind acts of faith that meet with intransigence, the occasional wild gesture, the undying if inconstant nature of hope, the possibility of growth springing up in unforeseen ways. Fish Tank is about these things, and because it never swerves into conventional territory it stands alone as a masterpiece of originality, the work of what is surely one of the best and most exciting filmmakers working today.