This is Andrea Arnold (middle) during Q&A at the Toronto International Film Festival where she is presenting Fish Tank. A coming-of-age tale about a 15-year-old girl living in the slums of Essex, England. It stars Michael Fassbender and newcomer Katie Jarvis who Arnold cast after she was overheard arguing with her boyfriend on a train platform.
Simply put, Jarvis is the film. The story is told from her unique point of view. It’s more than two hours of Jarvis. And it’s never too much.
She plays Mia, a raw teen who doesn’t want to fit in.
The film opens with Mia headbutting the leader of a group of girls, quickly establishing why she’s a loner and spends her time dancing to the sounds of hip hop blaring from her Ipod earphones in a vacant apartment somewhere in the bleak tower she lives in.
Her mother is a blond party girl who sports short, short denim skirts, drinks beer and enjoys noisy sex. When she brings Connor (Fassbender), her new man, home he is not only irresistible to mommy.
After watching Mia dance in a parking lot after a “make believe we’re a family” outing, Connor encourages Mia to follow her dream of being a hip hop dancer. And from there both their fates are sealed. The chemistry between the two after that is likely to explode… and does.
To better prepare for an upcoming dance audition, Connor introduces Mia to Bobby Womack’s cover of California Dreaming. The song becomes a haunting ode to the dreams of otherness Mia pines for throughout the film.
The film’s atmosphere is as coarse as Mia’s language, but the opportunity for giving love is always present. Especially when Mia tries to free an apparently starving white horse tied to a cement block at some trailer trash settlement beside a highway. The horse scenes have an ethereal quality, almost touching something mythical. But when Mia is brutally attacked for trying to free the horse, she drops her prized Ipod in the process.
Mia’s unharnessed rage takes us to yet more unexpected places. And it all works beautifully.
Andrea Arnold has directed the acclaimed short films Milk (98), Dog (01) and Wasp (03), which won the Academy Award® for best live-action short. Red Road (06), her first feature film, was awarded the Prix du Jury at the 2006 Cannes Film Festival. She has been compared to another British great—Ken Loach. And the comparisons are justified.
Arnold brings rare sensibility to family dysfunction and exhilarated hopelessness.