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Reviews of Recent Independent, Foreign, & Documentary Films in Theaters and DVD/Home Video
FISH TANK
Sure enough, after finishing up with Joanne, he’s out the door, hopping in his car and driving off. The girl watches him leave with a range of emotions. In the course of just this short scene, note a plethora of meanings: Mia lives in an impoverished, single-mother household, fantasizes about escaping from her home, and begins her role in an Oedipal love triangle, to name three. Writer and director Andrea Arnold—a rising star herself with a Cannes Jury Prize for this film, another for 2006’s Red Road, and a 2003 Academy Award for the short film Wasp—is certainly not one to avoid complex thematic recipes, balancing them well in each of her powerful films, though Fish Tank, a fine film and no less effective than her previous ones, feels somehow over-seasoned. For one, the “escape from home” syndrome is trodden territory. Here Arnold enhances it unnecessarily with metaphor, as in another early scene where Mia stumbles upon a white horse chained in a junkyard lot, and laments the animal’s stationary existence. The specter of her own escape looms throughout. Behind door number one is an alternative boarding school, while door number two promises a glamorous job as a hip-hop dancer, the training for which is Mia’s only respite from the stress of her daily life. The film’s ending, though, assigns Mia’s eventual flight a gravity that feels more like a Hollywood ending than a true dramatic resolution. However uncomfortable her films may make viewers—Wasp and Red Road included—Arnold has a thing for happy endings. Another of the film’s subjects is class. Connor is obviously slumming, gratifying a want rather than a need. He’s not a rich man, but his situation is nonetheless representative. The bilking of a few quid from his wallet or the bumming of a fiver while he’s at work suggests he is a stable financial resource for Mia. Arnold is no slack, though, and her weighty themes work best when underemphasized, rising unaffectedly from the characters rather than as an added construct. Whatever peskiness compels Arnold to symbolically title this film Fish Tank, though, overemphasizes the wrong points. Ms. Arnold has something much more radical to say. At its core, the film is really about sexual abuse, and marks an important reversal in its approach. Too often teenaged girls are assigned as coquettes and understood to be the impetus behind sex. Freud’s Oedipus/Electra complex is probably the original culprit, describing sexual attraction between family members as stemming from the child’s developing libido rather than the parent’s already established one. Fish Tank plays directly against this, exposing Mia’s emotional fluctuation as Connor changes his attitude from lover to father and back again. She’s a total victim, taking her cues from the elder’s behavior, as children should. When Connor behaves like a father, she behaves like a child, and when he behaves like a lover, she responds. As much as
Mia is the central character here, she bears the brunt of Connor’s
difficult identity struggle. Arnold allows this to happen with a sense
of self-awareness, describing a sexual situation between an older man
and younger girl as irresponsible and exploitative. Connor is not purely
a bad
guy, and he truly attempts a fatherly role, but it takes a man
to be a dad. He is, unfortunately, not up to the task, not at least in
the big bad world of the graffiti-scarred housing project, a kind of primal human testing ground.
The line between father and lover is certainly too fine for a
15-year-old girl, and perhaps, suggests Arnold, for an adult as well.
Michael Lee
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In the first scene in
which 15-year-old Mia and thirty-something Connor meet, he’s stopping
into her
decrepit kitchen between romps with Mia’s young mother, Joanne (Kierston
Wareing). Still brimming after a particularly bad day amongst her peers, Mia (newcomer Kate Jarvis) looks up to
see a shirtless Connor (Michael Fassbender), and is caught helplessly in a
hormonal snare. Mia’s indignant teenage wrath is no match for this sexy
stranger’s low hanging jeans and effortless flirtations. Fassbender—a
talented Euro-McConaughey, and arguably a major star on the rise—is far
too pretty to be screwing around here in this slum, however fit Mia’s
mother may be. One look at his poorly fashioned mustache belies his
commitment to this suburban working-class world.