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Katie Jarvis stars as Mia in Fish Tank. She got the part after she was spotted by director Andrea Arnold arguing with her boyfriend on a station platform |
Shocking portrait of forgotten broken Britain
FISH TANK
Directed by Andrea Arnold
Certificate 15
IT is impossible not to watch Fish Tank without a heavy black cloud hanging over you about the state of our country today.
This incredible film strips away any pretence that Britain is a fair and just society.
Mia (Katie Jarvis) is a 15-year -old for whom the world has dealt a bad hand.
We learn she has been excluded from school and ostracised by her fiends. She is violent, rude, angry – and prone to putting herself in dangerous situations.
She lives in a flat with her younger sister, who though under 10 years of age is already going off the rails, and a mother who parties hard and is far from a positive role model. There is no mention of the girls’ father. The mum appears to be of the acid house generation, still young in so many ways but with a teenage girl – a raver who still wants to party and whose parenting skills have not been developed.
While we are treated to vignettes about the life Mia leads, the story really begins in earnest after this believable backdrop has been painted for us. We discover that Mia is a keen dancer – she breaks into an empty flat on her estate, drinks cheap cider and works out moves with a dream of somehow earning a living dancing. Meanwhile, her mother brings home new boyfriend Connor (Michael Fassbender) who treats the daughters as humans and gains extra kudos by the fact he drives a car.
But things begin to go wrong as the relationship between Connor and Mia develops in an unsavoury way. To expand any further could undermine the enthralling nature of this story. It is enough to say there are moments where you think something obvious is about to happen, where it would have been easy for the writer to slip into a cliché, only to be utterly surprised. It is a brave piece of writing and has haunted me since the credits rolled.
It has similarities with the Maori film Once Were Warriors, in depicting a class who find themselves in a cruel environment with few chances to do anything about it.
Set in the badlands of the Thames estuary, a world of run-down Essex housing estates, this is broken Britain writ large. When you look at the lives being led in this film – and it is so true to life – you can’t help but have a Cathy Come Home moment. Ken Loach’s seminal 1960s work on homelessness changed the political landscape and led to the establishment of campaigning group Shelter.
This film shows a society that has not been helped by New Labour, and it is hard to believe that the let-them-eat-cake brigade of Cameron’s Tories are aware that this Britain exists, much less would know what to do about it.
It is a hidden world of unimaginable squalor. The characters who populate Fish Tank are not part of a working class – instead they are a section of our society that have been utterly abandoned, live off benefits and find solace in the cheap pleasures of drugs, sex and alcohol.
The estate itself is sandwiched by wastelands, old factories now reclaimed by buddleia and thistles. The A13, a road heavy with traffic, slices through it, and throws an imprengnable cordon round Mia’s world. The area’s anger is brilliantly and subtly evoked: a soundtrack is of dogs barking, car alarms going off, the muffled swearing of neighbours.
It provides a stage for some excellent performances. In a cast of unknowns, there is no weak link – each is believable. But Katie Jarvis stands out, simply because she has the most screen time – it is even more impressive when you consider how she was cast. The director had already trawled stage schools and dance classes for her lead. She then went to Essex shopping malls and nightclubs, anywhere she thought teenagers would hang out.
Andrea spotted Jarvis having a nasty argument with her boyfriend on the platform of Tilbury train station, and it got her the lead role. |
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