‘Fish Tank’: Andrea Arnold’s raw tale of dysfunctional female coming-of-age
British cinema has long been tied to the social realist tradition, which boomed in the 1950s and ‘60s with the ‘kitchen sink drama’ movement. Filmmakers like John Schlesinger, Tony Richardson and Karel Reisz were some of the biggest names of the era, predominantly – although not exclusively – focusing on male protagonists as they navigate social issues.
These working-class characters were presented in a way they hadn’t been on screen before, giving a well-needed voice to a cinematically underrepresented group. Films such as The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning and A Kind of Loving exposed the tough living and working conditions faced by many Britons, paving the way for a new kind of British cinema, more honest and realistic than ever before.
There were movies revolving around female characters, most notably A Taste of Honey, adapted from a play written by Shelagh Delaney, but all of the directors from this movement were male. While directors like Mike Leigh and Ken Loach started to give women more autonomy in the social realist realm, it wasn’t until the late 1990s and early ‘00s that we started to see movies emerge from female social realist filmmakers.
Andrea Arnold is arguably one of the greatest contributors to the genre, largely using her camera to tell stories about working-class women. Her early short film, Wasp, which won her an Oscar, set the tone for the rest of her career, preoccupied with a struggling single mother living on a council estate who tries to juggle a romantic life while caring for three children. With Fish Tank, her second feature, we also follow a protagonist trapped by the confines of a council estate, where she struggles to find a sense of personal fulfilment and happiness.
Mia, a 15-year-old girl living with her young mother and little sister, Tyler, is lonely and dissatisfied, and we witness her attempts to find solace in dancing, which she practises alone in an empty apartment on the estate. She often gets into physical and verbal fights with local girls and has a fraught relationship with her family, who don’t seem to care much for Mia.
Yet, Arnold, who also grew up with a single mother on a council estate, affords the characters a level of understanding, complexity and visibility that is so rarely given to working-class people on screen. Arnold doesn’t present the characters through the lens of poverty porn, but she is simply honest and unflinching in her depiction of Mia and her family, whose tumultuous relationship and living conditions are a symptom of the British government’s routine ability to fail its citizens.
Mia is a tough and layered character, played terrifically by Katie Jarvis, who Arnold plucked off the street. She has bite, shouting at people with little care for the repercussions, and in one horrifying sequence, she proves that she will go to extreme lengths when acting on emotion, specifically anger. Yet, Arnold never demonises her protagonist, instead treating her with care and consideration. Mia is clearly vulnerable due to her lack of stability and a support network, and this leads her to act recklessly, such as when she tries to rescue a horse that has been chained up.
However, in these moments of impulsiveness, we get to see how tender and caring Mia is at heart. She only acts viciously when people aggravate her first, easily succumbing to the bait due to a lifetime of being let down and being treated rudely by her careless mother. She just wants to have fun and enjoy the experience of being young and free, something she only seems to feel when she’s hanging out with Billy, the horse’s owner with whom she strikes up a connection. We see them playing with trolleys outside of a warehouse shop, acting like kids, and it’s joyous to watch Mia being so carefree.
Mia’s desire for connection also gets her into an abusive situation when Connor arrives on the scene, her mother’s new boyfriend (played by Michael Fassbender). He’s attractive, often walking around the small flat with his top off, and he attempts to bond with Mia through music. Their relationship descends into something wholly inappropriate, leading to the film’s most intense moment before the denouement.
Arnold shows no restraint when depicting Mia’s alienation from others, dissecting the intersection between class issues and female coming-of-age beautifully. At the same time, there is plenty of humour and tenderness sprinkled throughout, making Fish Tank a charming and heartfelt film which offers a glimpse of hope through its gentle ending.
Arnold’s film pulls back the curtain on a demographic that is rarely seen on screen, using a feminine lens, which makes for a welcome change in the social realist genre. Fish Tank remains incredibly underrated despite being one of the 2000s’ most important and beautifully made films.
