30 October 2009
andrea arnold's fish tank: initial thoughts
[Contains spoilers, probably. I'm never sure what counts and what doesn't.]
Finally got round to seeing Fish Tank, which is a brilliant piece of work: as unsentimental as it is moving, with a tweaked realism that makes Mike Leigh look like he has all the observational capacity of an autistic Martian. Fish Tank is all the things Owen says it is and more: Arnold's portrayal of the Essex housing estate is so successful because it doesn't look in the obvious places to run the usual 'I'm trapped, just look at the architecture! Freedom lies elsewhere' theme of so many kitchen-sink-estate narratives: the place where Mia lives on is not claustrophobic in the sense of endless blocks and dilapidated walkways of Brit cinema, lapped-up by well-heeled Euro audiences (Britain is always already its cute dinky cinematic underclass). In fact the landscape of Arnold's Essex is remarkably porous, classwise and otherwise. Mia, who, out of poverty and inclination, walks (or runs) everywhere, alongside main roads, through fields, in water, occupies the outer edges of the outer edges, dancing in the the empty rooms of an unoccupied building and skirting liminal zones containing horses and broken cars.
Arnold is an expert at capturing nature, the weird city kind of animality that threatens at every moment to encroach on the metropolis (think of the increasing boldness of London's urban foxes, now all the way up to St Paul's). This nature, flocks of birds, and their industrial-environmental counterparts, wind-turbines, cranes and pylons stand in for a kind of abandoned and neglected hinterland that overlooks its humanity as badly as it treats its nature, even allowing for the odd environmental monolith, slapped out in the middle of nowhere among those who presumably won't complain, or won't be heard if they do.
Fish Tank is also a brilliant film about two things that hardly ever get depicted on film: teenage androgyny and female drive. Mia is a kind of relatively present, but rarely captured, post-tom boy, make-up and big earrings with baggy tracksuits and a hoodie that she pulls up half-aggressively, half-defensively. Her athleticism is put to excellent use at various key moments, and her peculiar kind of sexiness owes more to hip-hop than it does to porn. She is no woman, but no girl either, her sister, Tyler, a kind of complete version of the tom-boy in its nascent, unreflective state, all swearing and shoving things out of the way. Mia's drive - her passion for dancing - is no fairytale escape-route. She is, as Owen puts it 'naively unaware of what role the dancing girl is supposed to play in the 21st century libidinal economy as a quasi-pornographic ornament'. The other women at the audition for dancing girls that forms perhaps the most devastating scene (despite the menace of many of the others) have understood what it means to be a 'woman' in 21st century Britain: all sub-porn grimaces, bared thighs and pandering to the judges, real or imaginary. But this isn't 'dancing' as Mia understands it, and it's not sex either, as complicated, and as intertwined, as those two things become for her.
Mia's determination, which will mercifully not be her salvation, is beautifully drawn: booze is not an escape, it's a way of focussing her project, honing her moves. The final few moments, the hint of a threadbare, and possibly unredemptive escape, are perhaps undermined by a weirdly cloying last few seconds (but is Arnold being ironic? It's hard to tell), but Fish Tank is a paean to the dispossessed everywhere, human or otherwise.
