Towards the end of Fish Tank, Andrea Arnold’s most recent contribution to the film world and winner of the Jury’s award at the Cannes film festival, the heroine whips down her oversized tracksuit bottoms and urinates all over the carpet. Hurtling along at an unrelenting pace, the film has been building to this moment of release. It is an image so poignant that the viewer recoils and yet does not lose the thread of action even for a moment. We are held forcibly in this inner city concrete backwater for better or worse.
‘Gritty realism’ has never been my thing. An aesthetic identified only by middle class film critics and media junkies, what does gritty even mean? Untainted by idealism, left untouched by Hollywood’s paintbrush or simply a pompous term to describe the living conditions of the human populace as seen through self-important indie flicks? I think my disdain comes from a personal disregard for anything I deem fake, especially if it’s disguised as honest. Portrayals of minorities often come with a side of judgement and generalization or try too hard to capture a certain zeitgeist in its full and terrible glory.
In Fish Tank, Andrea Arnold takes social realism and grit into a new sphere, a more honest one. Nothing is black or white in this world but subtlety exists in every crack and cranny, in every face and look. Set in an Essex council estate, the film follows fifteen-year-old Mia, a high-school drop out with a foul attitude and a penchant for hip-hop dancing. As the opening credits fall off the screen, we see her standing against a backdrop of blue wallpaper in an abandoned council flat, her hair pulled into a ponytail so tight that bald patches appear behind her ears. Her chest heaves, out of breath from dancing, and her faux gold plated hoop earrings clank against her pale neck. The room in the flat has a large window that looks over the entire estate and, from behind, we see Mia survey the territory through glass- a motif that will punctuate the film throughout.
Mia is always on the outside looking in, a spectator of human relationships but rarely a participant. When her Mother- a perpetually drunk tarnished peroxide blonde who wants little to do with her daughters- brings home a new boyfriend, Mia’s glass window is shattered. Connor, a handsome Irish man with a real job and a penchant for fucking Mia’s mother, sees the dancer in her. When he loans her his video camera to record a piece for an upcoming audition, she watches him through the clouded lens, fabric grazing against his bare chest, his eyes acknowledging her gaze. Connor transforms Mia’s world, taking her family for a drive in the country and teaching her to catch a fish with her bare hands. Beams of light stream through the windows of his old banged up car and Mia closes her eyes and presses her face to the smudged glass.
Arnold employs her huge arsenal of storytelling devices and adds more and more tangles to the web as the film progresses. She allows us to both love and hate these characters simultaneously and we feel every twist and turn in a physical way. The film lacks a certain falseness that stories of this kind often display. This is primarily due to the fine breakout performance of Katie Jarvis, who had never acted before her role in this film and was discovered at the train station while fighting with her boyfriend. Whether Jarvis is indeed as some as suggested, just playing herself, or an extension of herself, she gives a ferocious and driving performance, steering the film towards its emotional climax.
Camera work feels organic like watching from the eyes of a present but invisible person, embodying Mia’s shadow. It follows the dialogue of breath that permeates the action, loping along as Mia is carried on Connor’s back or as they make love on the ratty old sofa, the industrial urban landscape acting a perfectly juxtaposed backdrop for this narrative of human connection. Avoiding miserabilism and condescension in equal measure, Arnold pitches this story in a perfectly nuanced way until the end, where it veers slightly into the melodramatic. Without giving too much away, we find it difficult to imagine that the story can go with far without losing its credibility and our trust.
We are left, however, at the close of the film with an enormous reel of images to move us. The windmill turning repetitively while the story unfolds, barely clad girls gyrating in the parking lot and an aging but beautiful white horse chained up in a junkyard. The sequence that resonates most strongly however, is Mia. Sweating and pale, she moves her body to the slow rhythm of Connor’s favourite song- Womack’s “California Dreaming”- the movement of her bony hips casting a shadow on the wallpaper and the world carrying on below. She exudes a humanity and accessibility that’s missing from the two dimensional characters in a film like “Precious”. A character caught in the perpetual wheel of life, she has been broken from her trance and will move forward into an uncertain future.