Fish Tank: Dead-End Living

Andrea Arnold’s film offers a gritty take on the working class urban existence.

“Life’s a bitch, and then you die.” The refrain to Nas’ well-known hip-hop song plays as the credits roll at the end of Andrea Arnold’s film Fish Tank, and appropriately so. It perfectly summarizes the dead-end existence of working class urban life captured in the film.

Fish Tank follows a few weeks in the life of lead character Mia, a bitter and angry 15-year-old, played superbly with brooding teenage angst by neophyte actress Kate Jarvis. Mia, her younger sister Tyler, and her single, incompetent, self-pitying mother live in a crowded, low-rent apartment complex, itself part of an oppressive concrete jungle of similar buildings. Mia, her family, and most of the bit players that populate the film are truly in a fish tank – trapped, looking blankly at an external world they cannot access, with no real hope of escape.

When we first encounter Mia, she is in full rebellion, yet has an ill-thought-out dream of becoming a dancer. She has no real friends, dances mostly for and by herself, and is angry without understanding why. The first person to encourage her is her mom’s new boyfriend, Conner (Michael Fassbender), who arrives in the all-female household with wry warmth and humour. Having no father or masculine role model in her life, Mia is not sure what to make of her Mom’s new beau – she is nervously attracted to him, but at the same time clearly uncomfortable with his attention.

The film has a jumpy and unexpected quality that is refreshing. Too often, these kinds of narratives are predictable in their very doomed hopelessness. Apparently Arnold, who was the writer as well as director, did not allow the cast to read the whole screenplay, only giving each actor the script for upcoming scenes a few days before filming them. Because it was shot chronologically, none of the actors knew what would happen by the end of the film – a technique that preserved the film’s hyper-realism.

Momentum is created, the suspense builds, and relationships change, but issues such as consent and fault are not as straightforward as they seem. No one is capable of good judgment, or of bearing responsibility for rash actions or “choices” – characteristics that well-meaning social workers and welfare policy wonks eagerly wish to inculcate in the “poor.” It’s hard to figure out why that is so impossible unless you are in the middle of it, but Arnold’s film offers a partial explanation.

Shot mostly by hand-held camera, both interior and exterior scenes feel oppressively claustrophobic and crowded. Fish Tank is very much in the tradition of gritty, working-class British realism, and one feels the influence of Ken Loach mixed with a dollop of Rainer Werner Fassbinder, particularly his early work.

However, Arnold brings to her film a simultaneous harshness and sensitivity to the subtleties of her mostly female cast – where a downward glance, make-up running down a crying face, shouting an expletive, or wearing a garment suggestively convey as much meaning as the dialogue. There is thankfully no heavy-handed proselytizing here, but the metaphor is slightly over-extended when, at the film’s conclusion, we see a balloon flying haphazardly up and away in its own attempted escape.