ONCE AGAIN, Andrea Arnold delivers a superb film that, though technically brilliant and absolutely sure of its own voice, will be watched through many uneasily curled fingers. After an Academy Award-winning short ( Wasp) and a Cannes favourite ( Red Road), the director returns to the discontents of working-class Britain and discovers yet more terrifyingly inappropriate situations in which to place her characters.
Fish Tank, which, like Red Road, won the Jury Prize at Cannes, focuses on a few days in the life of a troubled kid from an unlovely corner of Essex. Recently booted out of school, Mia Williams (Katie Jarvis) lives with her mother (Kierston Wareing) and sister (Rebecca Griffiths) in a busy, noisy house on an ordinary street.
Life changes when Mum hooks up with Connor, an apparently charming Irish security guard (Michael Fassbender), who treats the two kids with a degree of respect and appears to have his new girlfriend’s best interests in mind. Mia has decided to attend a dance audition and, despite her profanely expressed hostility to all things and all people, finds herself accepting advice on music choices from Connor. If you’ve seen an Andrea Arnold film before, you will rightly suspect that the relationship is destined for an unhappy resolution.
Jarvis, hitherto a non-professional actor, delivers a performance of such astringent surliness that it fairly strips the fabric from the cinema screen. Yet, despite her unremitting, unfocused fury, the character manages, through her vitality and originality of outlook, to generate surprising degrees of empathy. Surrounded by an equally strong troupe of supporting players (Fassbender has yet to be anything other than incandescent), Jarvis invites us to bite our fingers as she puts herself in ever-greater peril.
Yet, for all its grit and grime, Fish Tankdoesn't feel like a work of the purest naturalism. Featuring gorgeously liquid camerawork by our own Robbie Ryan (utilising a tight, televisual aspect ratio to press home the sense of constraint alluded to in the title) the film often has the quality of an incongruously beautiful nightmare.
More damagingly, Arnold’s habitual dedication to narrative sadism is beginning to cramp her style somewhat. Aficionados now know that the worst possible consequence will develop from every situation and that such consequences will be detailed in the grimmest, lengthiest detail.
So Arnold might want to consider reconfiguring the controls slightly for her next feature. Till then, resonant images such as those of Jarvis dancing sublimely to classic hip-hop will sustain Arnold’s deserved reputation as one of our era’s great visual poets.
