Fish Tank

directed & written by Andrea Arnold

Fish Tank is a brilliant film. Despite an odd spell where it seems to drag its feet a little, it is a film of complexities and shades which makes the bum-ache well worthwhile.

The film follows Mia, a teenage girl from an estate who headbutts other girls and swigs from two-litre bottles of cider. One of her only pleasures is to dance and when her mother's new boyfriend catches her doing this he encourages in her a dream of dancing professionally and he rubbishes the defeatism so ingrained in her poverty-stricken way of thinking. Over the course of the film I developed a worry that we were heading towards some terrible American Dream ending, but I was wrong. And in fact this film was a brilliant antidote to Billy Elliot and the brainless neoliberalism it promotes. This film is a whole lot more real than that.

Katie Jarvis was apparently 'discovered' when she was having a bawling match with her boyfriend from opposite sides of a railway platform. Such an anecdote makes perfect sense when you see her onscreen as Mia because she is so believable and genuine that it's heart-breaking, heart-warming and everything in-between.

There are numerous plot lines interweaving and we're left with a deep and textured film that is also rough and raw. Ultimately though it is an anti-coming of age film, a film that follows Mia as she is curious about the world around her but is unable to show it because of the society in which she lives, in which the only way to survive is to appear hard and reject all feelings of empathy to other human beings. Her mother's new boyfriend initially brings tenderness into her life, and she begins to let her guard down a little, she starts to experience hope when her whole life has been without hope. But in the end the reasons she has spent so long being so guarded are validated, and the hope that has been fostered is cruelly smashed.

The underbelly of British society really is hopeless, the only thing you can do is get out... but to what? There is no promise of a bright future when Mia leaves. It's simply the last thing she can do.

Fish Tank shows very well the hopelessness of being on the wrong end of a capitalist society, the trapped lives and the unfulfilled potential. The risk of being exploited by the self-absorbed middle class is also a clear theme, and it reduces Mia to the point that all she can do is urinate on it. This film makes me empathise with her position on that a great deal.

Awesome film.