Fish Tank review
Find out why everyone's talking about this tender follow-up to Red Road, which could well be the film of the year
11 September 2009
video
Rating: 4/5
Cert: 15, 124min
Starring: Katie Jarvis, Michael Fassbender, Kierston Wareing
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There’s a moment at the start of Fish Tank – Andrea Arnold’s rather brilliant follow-up to her impressive 2006 debut Red Road – where you suspect she’s settled into a little-known sub-genre: poverty porn. We see feral kids butting each other, shouting “c**t” as if taking breath, and downing cider like hamsters glugging on water bottles.
And yes, like Red Road (which was set on a Glasgow estate) the underclass Essex-estate world does not make for fun times. The surly, spiky focus, 15-year-old Mia (a brilliant debut from Jarvis), is no heroine. Arnold quickly breaks free from any accusation of voyeuristic thrills with a follow-up that’s tender, true, often uncomfortable, and shorn of nearly all sentimentality.
There’s not a lot of plot to speak of here – as Mia begins to long for her mother’s latest boyfriend Connor (Fassbender) and he begins to reciprocate – yet that barely seems to matter.
Arnold is a master of small moments that stop the heart: the head she rests on his shoulder as he gives her a piggy-back, the violent cusses that signal affection; the gaze that lingers a little too long. There’s poetry in her film-making, a sense of the beauty in grime.
Andy Lowe, when reviewing Red Road in this paper, put it best when he wrote that Arnold “captures the tender terrors of human connection” better than in any asinine romcom. In Fish Tank, she does that and more, and the line between the two has never felt closer.
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