Andrea Arnold appeared on my radar a few years ago with her live-action short, Wasp, which ended up winning the Oscar for that category in 2004. It was a gritty neo-realist picture about a poor woman living in a somewhat rural area with a few out-of-wedlock kids without the financial ability to raise them.
Her follow-up film, Red Road, which was released in 2007, was also about the English lower classes, but this time from the point of view of a woman voyeur. She is not as poor as some, but she watches them and ultimately gets into a relationship with a lower-working-class man.
In her most recent film, Fish Tank, Arnold again delves into the world of poor people living on state assistance with little chance of a future. This is a relative thematic mix of the two previous films, dealing with children in trouble, voyeurism and hopeless poverty. The film focuses on Mia, a 15-year-old girl who loves dancing an hopes to use dancing to get out of the terrible world she's in. She lives with her single mother and her little sister (possibly from another father). She never goes to school, drinks beer all the time and picks fights with girls (and boys) in her area.
She meets a young man who is out of work and down on his luck and begins what seems to be a non-sexual relationship with him. At the same time, her mother meets a man, Connor, who is a decent-seeming guy. He loudly and wildly has sex with her mother, but also cares about her and her sister. He is clearly the most stable male force in her life, but the way her mother goes through men, it's clear he will not be around for too long. At some point her sexuality is peeked by the two men in her life and she begins to play with the idea of acting on it.
This is a world where nothing can really go right for Mia. She knows that life sucks and that she should keep her hopes to a minimum, but she can't help herself sometimes - leading to great disappointments along the way. The gritty frankness of the film is very appealing and puts us directly into the world we are seeing. There are no real flashy techniques used to tell the story - mostly it's a hand-held single camera that takes long shots. This realism helps to make us feel as desperate as Mia and as pitiful and hopeless.
Stylistically the film is wonderful, and is very reminiscent of other neo-realist fare from recent years - movies like Ballast or In-Between Days. The story here is a bit too complex, though, and this doesn't turn out as well as those films. The third act here is a bit sloppy with the story going in a direction is should not. It is a two-hour film and it needs to be only 90 or even 85 minutes.
The acting throughout is very solid. Mia is played by Katie Jarvis who seems to be a non-actor, or a new actor. She is very good and very believable. Connor is played beautifully by the Irish-German Michael Fassbender. This is a really great performance. Connor is a cool, nice happy guy who seems to not see the terrible world that surround him. It is easy to see why Mia is excited by him - he's a really dynamic guy.
I think Arnold really could have used a better story editor for the script - and I think this could have been a very good movie with some minor cuts. There is the nucleus of a good movie here - it just goes on a bit too long. I have generally liked the three films of hers that I have seen - and I look forward to seeing more.
Stars: 2.5 of 4
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I think she's getting better and better and her next movie should hopefully be good dramatically and not just technically.
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