“They’re full of spastics and idiots, those places.”
A British melodramatic social realist film in the tradition of Ken Loach and Mike Leigh, Andrea Arnold’s Fish Tank surveys lower-class England through the eyes of a hostile fifteen year old girl (Kate Jarvis) who likes to play hooky from school, cuss out and bully her peers, recreate popular hip hop dance routines, and flirt with her hard living, neglectful mother’s (Kierston Wareing) louche boyfriend (Michael Fassbender).
The cramped, cluttered, dingy living space that she occupies with her mother and younger sister (Rebecca Griffiths), as well as fences, walls, and locked gates that are commonplace in this desolate vision of Essex, depict this strong-willed teenager as circumstantially restrained. The ubiquitous junkyards and vacant lots accentuate her utter loneliness; the long stretches of moody silence and 1.33:1 aspect ratio her oppression; Robbie Ryan’s handheld camera her disorientation; her attempt to release a chained white horse her inarticulable desire to break free. But, because she’s grown up within such a bleak milieu, she can’t envision the possibility of rising above it all. In a sense, then, she’s trapped in a prison with invisible walls. Hence the title.
As the two girls act out behaviors learned from their elders—drinking, smoking, cussing, shouting, slamming doors, picking fights—the adults regress to children, acting on every immature impulse. The film finds heartbreaking notes in these moments when the children’s’ aesthetic markers of adolescence are set against the realities of their grown-up-too-fast personalities, with its apogee coming in the form of the nubile Jarvis innocently losing herself in a clumsy dance-off with the predatory authority figure who sees the confused young girl as an object of lust and sexual conquest. As many have noted, Fassbender’s sleazy surrogate father is less pedophile than omnivorous opportunist—i.e. he’s not attracted to the girl because she’s fifteen, but because she’s within his social orbit (although his questionable interactions with her younger sister have nastier implications)—but that doesn’t make the physical manifestation of their mutual attraction any less distressing.