“Fish Tank”: no sophomore slump for Andrea Arnold

Life at the pram-face is tough for 15-year-old Mia. She’s no Wallace and certainly no Farrow but another damaged Essex girl living in the shadow of the A13. Kicked out of school, isolated from her mates and at war with her single mum and younger sister Tyler, “MTV Cribs” and other unobtainable symbols of American culture constantly bombard her. Mia’s only release is when she practises her very average dancing in an empty flat in her tower block.

Andrea Arnold’s second feature, “Fish Tank,” is a mesmerising marriage of Alan Clarke and Andrei Tarkovsky. Like Clarke in “Christine,” Arnold follows her young protagonist as she walks and walks and walks between drab estates, scummy shops and back again. With time on your hands and no money for public transport, Shanks’s pony is the only way to travel.

Yet Arnold elevates these desperate journeys with Tarkovskian motifs of water, clouds and reflections alongside errant balloons, seashell wind chimes and cluttered make-up drawers- which is her own interpretation of the Russian director’s manifesto on filmmaking –  “Sculpting In Time.” Her image of The Thames Gateway area is at once horrendous and beautiful, beaten and triumphant, with the low whoosh of cars and the sub-bass of reggae or hip-hop.

This is also a world where the word ‘c*nt’ is hurled around like knives in a trainee circus act, with relish and abandon. Amongst the young women in Mia’s family, the only swear word in the English language to retain any power is gradually eroded as they fall deeper and deeper into a cycle of diminished responsibility.

Mia’s mum, played by rising star Kierston Wareing, is jealous and resentful of her daughter, eagerly awaiting Mia’s transfer to a referral unit. We never hear any talk of the father but we can easily fill in the blanks for ourselves. Mum’s sexy in a “Happy Shopper” kind of way and laments the loss of her youth to parenthood, trying to make up for it by bundling her kids out or up to their beds so she can party with her friends. At her lowest point, she tells Mia, “I nearly had you aborted. I even made an appointment.”

One morning Mia and Tyler awake to a council estate Achilles, a glistening Homeric Hero in the shape of Michael Fassbender’s mysterious Connor. Is he just another of their mother’s lovers or can he promise the girls the stability, encouragement, love and affection they so yearn and crave for? Is this situation more sinister than it looks?

As in her superb debut “Red Road,” Arnold is a master of the mixed message. When Connor carries a drunk Mia to bed, Arnold films it in dreamlike slow motion with just the sound of their breathing barely audible. Are we witnessing a teenage girl’s infatuation with an older man or an older man’s grooming of an underage girl? Several later exchanges make us feel uneasy but Fassbender’s electric smile and soothing voice still have the audience questioning their misgivings about Connor.

“Fish Tank” overflows with exceptional performances. Fassbender is now the heir to Daniel Day Lewis and Gary Oldman and Rebecca Griffiths’ awesome turn as Tyler has the best lines, but it is newcomer Katie Jarvis as Mia who shoplifts the film from everyone else. Famously discovered at a train station arguing with her boyfriend, she seems to have carried this row into her sublimely realised role and unleashed it on her fellow actors. Despite her ability to be showy, it’s the quiet moments she truly excels in.

Near the end she dances to Nas’ “Life’s a Bitch” with her mother and sister, one of the few times all three are completely in sync with one another. Its fleeting and transient and soon broken by Tyler’s foul mouth – “Bye you skank!” – but it’s as real and poignant as a thousand Hollywood happy endings.