Fish Tank Reviews part 2

http://blaze.gaynewsnetwork.com.au/film/fish-tank-003759.html

Fish Tank

Written by Colin Fraser | 24 May 2010

FISH TANK (M) 4 stars

Starring Katie Jarvis, Michael Fassbender

Directed by Andrea Arnold

Mia likes to dance and, like many teenage girls growing up in commission housing while watching Britain's Got Talent, she hopes it is her ticket out. And when her young mother gets a new boyfriend, things start looking up. For one thing, he likes her dancing.

It's about here that you get that sinking feeling that Mia and her family are in line for a beating. However it's not the standard council misery-fest of, say, Ken Loach or the recent Harry Brown.

As with her festival favoured debut Red Road, director Andrea Arnold treats audiences to a densely layered story wrapped around a kernel of defiance and resolve.

More interestingly, her superb drama opens up a woman's lot without once dissolving into a chick-flick, then even more significantly manages an uplifting resolve against all expectation. That's if time spent on a dead-end estate with foul-tongued skanks and predatory men is in anyway uplifting.

Central to this success is a blinding performance from Katie Jarvis as Mia, and Inglorious Basterds' hypnotic Michael Fassbender as Mum's studly new squeeze. Together they propel a story overflowing with sexual energy to a shocking conclusion that makes Fish Tank one of the year’s finest dramas.

http://www.altmedia.net.au/movie-fish-tank/17394

MOVIE: FISH TANK

Author:
Lena Rutkowski
Posted:
Monday, 24 May 2010

Hitting screens a few months after the hype surrounding gritty US hit Precious, which focused on adolescent misery in inner-city life, it’s easy to understand why viewers may cringe at the plot of director Andrea Arnold’s second film. Set amongst the peeling walls of British housing estate, violent, erratic adolescent Mia (Katie Jarvis) finds her life complicated when her alcoholic mother brings home a new boyfriend (Michael Fassbender), who displays a paternal, borderline sexual, interest in Mia. But this film is so much more than a series of depressing events in the life of a luckless girl. Arnold’s slow-paced, mockumentary-style transports the viewer directly into Mia’s ‘fishtank’, while close-up shots are so intimate that the viewer shifts uncomfortably in awkward moments, such as when Mia shyly performs her hip-hop routine for her mother’s new man. Set in summer, sunlight trickles in through the window, allowing Arnold to capture life in the working class burbs without rendering it either gloomy, or sentimental.
It makes sense that Jarvis, an untrained actress who was reportedly cast after a casting director overheard her cockney accent as she argued with a boyfriend, is every inch believable as the troubled teen decked out in hoop earrings and trackpants. She delivers a standout performance, capturing Mia’s vulnerability and eliciting sympathy even as the plot takes increasingly sinister turns. It’s the open, honest performances, particularly by Jarvis, which make for a realistic and deeply involving film. (LRu)

http://thefilmivejustseen.blogspot.com/2010/05/fish-tank.html

23 May 2010
FISH TANK: living life on the bottom

FISH TANK tells a story that can be taken as a damning and depressing indictment of society's failure to provide opportunities for those at the bottom of the pile to better themselves, or as a heartwarming, if unwashed and foul-mouthed, testament to the resilience of the human spirit in overcoming adversity and making lemonade out of lemons.

The reality is somewhere in the middle and though, by the end of the story our heroine is striking out for pastures new it's more because she's run out of options at home than because she's refused to give-in to her circumstances.

Mia (Katie Jarvis) is a combative15 year old girl living with her younger sister and their unemployed boozy, single mum in a flat in a rundown council high-rise on a charmless estate in the Essex suburbs of London. Faced with a mother who resents her kids for robbing her of her youth, Mia has become withdrawn, with a tough outer shell; relying entire on her own wits, and treating everyone with suspicion and contempt.

Dance is her only outlet, the one time she feels good about herself, but even that is a solitary pursuit. She practices her hip hop routines in an empty flat on the estate, showing them to no one. That changes when her mum's new boyfriend, Connor, starts showing an interest in her and encourages her to pursue her dream.

But as Mia slowly lets down her guard in response to Connor's warmth, his fatherly concern for her wellbeing begins to take on more disturbing overtones.

While the plot may sound familiar FISH TANK succeeds in being more than just another teenage rites of passage drama because of Jarvis's compelling performance. Mia's life story may check all the boxes in the list of "top 10 signs you've had an underprivileged upbringing" but Jarvis makes them a living, breathing reality.Mia is not an easy character to like but Jarvis makes it possible.

Michael Fassbender is also extremely effective as Connor, bringing real depth to a character who has so much potential for good right up to the moment when he succumbs to his baser instincts.

FISH TANK is gritty, rough-edged stuff. Think of it as the flipside to "An Education" which is reviewed elsewhere on this blog. The big difference is that where the latter ended on an optimistic note, the former can't make any such promises.
Posted by Laurence Tuccori at Sunday, May 23, 2010

http://thewaxconspiracy.com/reviews/fish-tank-394

Fish Tank

Ethan Switch - Monday, 24 May 2010 - Print Version

Living around people drip-feeding on welfare, you notice quick how much they waste away not just the money they inebriate themselves on, but the very fabric of the neighbourhood. Depression is a state of mind and they own premium bonds. Leaving is the only way to find a light, and you know they're not going to do it any time soon.

First few minutes of Fish Tank sets up the entire universe nicely. Vitriol spills from teenage knuckles to reveal the attitude and latitude of the locale, morale, the situation as a whole. A sad lot at that.

Rotting a death of ambition and hope, and a glimmer of something better than this, we're here with Mia (Katie Jarvis). A young chav in a world of chavs surrounding a block of welfare junkies.

Writer/director Andrea Arnold presents the world in a 4:3 ratio, eschewing a widescreen vision to affect a sense of claustrophobia and a definition of class status. The world isn't lavish, it's as-is and less so. Reality fills up with the poor dreams and hopes that wither and die. You don't get a widescreen view when all the TVs still have wood panelling.

Meandering on a broken road to nowhere and down, Mia, along with her mum, Joanne (Kierston Wareing) don't really do anything with their lives. Boozing it up (and Mia being only 15 with a ready source of hooch) is about as much activity they get up to within each other's little orbits. Never mind little Tyler (Rebecca Griffiths), absolutely foul of mouth and loving of her family knit.

Over in some empty room, or possibly an empty flat, Mia regularly tries to escape the dreck and dull of her existence with dance routines set to cut a groove while chugging down more alcohol at each of her sessions. In this little room, facing a world of desolation and despair, her eyes look out and pick up a spark, the want, to be elsewhere. Anywhere, anywhere but here.

Things are fine and boring until mum's new boyfriend, Connor (Michael Fassbender) enters their lives and with it, a sense of impropriety and a swagger. Connor brings with him also, a different set of eyes on their little world. A different perspective that rings a new sense of direction, and quite the turn it does take.
Fassbender and Jarvis really defy the presence of an age difference, wide as it is. Chemistry is a dangerous thing, the results which propel the final chunk of time in the seat toward the fade to black. And you don't realise how long you've been sitting there, engrossed.

Times are plentiful on how inappropriate the brooding atmosphere and sense of exit. Balancing a tricky nature between drama, tension and sheer disbelief at the unfolding, nothing really slows down, or speed up. It is, as it is. There and bare.

Fish Tank looks after itself. If your hopes and dreams rely on others, then you're going to be staring at the window for a while longer. Take a chance, change yourself, change your situation, walk out and up. You only have yourself to fall back on.

http://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/movies/a-tale-from-the-inside-looking-out-20100527-wh17.html

A tale from the inside looking out
CRAIG MATHIESON
May 28, 2010

Fish Tank...Katie Jarvis plays disaffected teen Mia.

Fish Tank casts aside troubled-child cliches to reveal deeper wounds.

IT'S a Friday night in London and Andrea Arnold is sitting in her garden, still revelling in the first warm day of the nascent northern summer. ''It's like honey after the cold winter,'' says the 49-year-old filmmaker, who has spent the entire week at her computer trying to finish a draft due on Monday morning of her adaptation of Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights.

''It's a crazy, silly thing to do,'' Arnold says of her next project, a sigh turning into a burst of laughter as she ponders her predicament. A few hours earlier, when she'd begun to feel besieged by pressure, Arnold put on a mix-tape she'd made for an old friend living in Spain - Dizzee Rascal, Pulp, Jamaican ska, Rolling Stones, Happy Mondays - and danced around her kitchen.

She describes dancing as one of the few pure pleasures in life, a belief she shares with Mia, the 15-year-old protagonist of her extraordinary second feature, Fish Tank. The film, winner of the Jury Prize at the Cannes Film Festival last year, is a lyrical, compelling examination of a life beset by anger and inarticulacy.
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Unless practising her hip-hop dancing in an abandoned council estate flat, Mia (played by Katie Jarvis, who hadn't acted previously) is a vituperative, furious teen. She rows with her mother, Jo (Kierston Wareing), who considers the teenager a rival instead of her child; picks fights with her peers; and casually abuses her younger sister - both her mother and a social worker believe some kind of institutionalisation would be best.

''I'm never satisfied when I finish something because it never feels finished,'' Arnold says. ''I never feel like I've realised it completely. You start off with something pure in your mind and something is left of it by the end of the film but perhaps not as much as you would like.''

The feel is initially offhand and certain ideas - such as a horse tied up on an abandoned lot that Mia wants to free - come across as bluntly obvious but it proves to be an acute coming-of-age story, particularly once the easygoing Connor (Michael Fassbender) fetches up in the family's crowded apartment as Jo's new boyfriend and a voice of encouragement for the insular, inexperienced Mia.

The film has a naturalistic authority that transcends that modern British obsession of council estate realism. Unlike Mike Leigh, who takes mordant pride in shattered urban spaces and violent youth, Arnold sees her setting as a matter-of-fact necessity and contrasts the estate with the Essex countryside that surrounds the blocks of flats and dilapidated shop fronts.

''I don't really care what's gone before. I have absolutely no thought about making a judgment on what has gone before or making a judgment about other filmmakers. I try to make something truthful in my own way,'' Arnold says firmly.

''That's quite a gentle housing estate. I think it's quite sweet. If I wanted to, I could show you far bigger and far worse,'' she adds. ''I'm surprised when people call it grim. Mia's fixations and moment in life are difficult but the actual surrounds are just a normal way to live. That's a more normal way to live for people here than Richard Curtis's Four Weddings and a Funeral terrace houses.''

Arnold has something of a similar relationship to the British film industry. She's a latecomer, having made her start as a dancer on television series such as Top of the Pops in the late 1970s before graduating to presenting children's shows. Only in the early 1990s did she get behind the camera, attending film school and becoming a mother.

Her short film, Wasp, won an Academy Award in 2004 (an excited Arnold managed to work ''bollocks'' into her acceptance speech) and in 2006 she made her first feature, Red Road, an obsessive thriller about a closed-circuit television camera operator in Glasgow.

Both Red Road and Fish Tank sprang from Arnold's people watching. A passer-by will catch her eye and from that image she'll begin creating a story in her head for them - if it takes root it becomes a script. Wuthering Heights, a 19th-century gothic romance, is of a different stock but Arnold isn't certain that it will invoke change in her private, nurturing methods.

''The reasons I'm attracted to having a go at it is that it doesn't start in the same place as my previous films,'' she admits. ''But when it comes down to it I do have one image in my mind that keeps me going on Wuthering Heights when things get tough. It's kind of the same thing with everything I do - I latch on to something I can't let go of. Even when I'm miserable and cursing that thing that started me, I can't let go of it.''

Fish Tank is now showing.

http://bwilsonmovies.blogspot.com/2010/05/fish-tank.html

Friday, May 28, 2010
Fish Tank

British film, Fish Tank, the sophomore feature film from director Andrea Arnold (Red Road), was originally scheduled to be released in Australia in March, but distributors were forced to move the films theatrical release to May 27th. For once this serious rescheduling is a positive sign. When Fish Tank won Outstanding British Film at the BAFTAS in February this year, the film’s season in British cinemas was extended and expanded, so there simply weren’t enough prints of the film to be sent to Australia.

It is always good to hear that a small budget film has been given an opportunity to reach a wider audience, and even though it has meant a delay for Australian audiences, most will agree this incredible film was worth the wait.

Set in and around an Essex Estate in South England, this film focuses on 15 year old Mia (newcomer, Katie Jarvis) and the impact her mum’s new relationship has on her. Set in the same sort of council estates as shown in the recently released Harry Brown, instead of stereotyping the lippy and troublesome Mia as a juvenile delinquent with homicidal tendencies- the marching-song propaganda of British tabloids, Arnold shows how vulnerable the seemingly bolshy and aggressive teenagers who live in these housing project truly are.

Living with her single mum, Joanne (Kierston Wareing) and younger, more sociable sister, Tyler (a fabulous performance from newcomer, Rebecca Griffiths), Mia has been excluded from school and spends her days wandering the estate, drinking cheap booze and practicing her dance routines. Both quick-witted and quick-tempered, Mia isn’t a pleasant teenager, but then she doesn’t seem to have any adults that particularly care how she is or what she does, that is until Connor (Michael Fassbender, 300, Inglourious Basterds) turns up.

Connor, Joanne’s new boyfriend, brings a whole new dynamic into Mia’s life, he not only notices her, but he also seems interested in her, what she thinks and what she does. Connor is like no-one Mia has met before, he has a steady job and a car and he like to get out of the city into the countryside.

Arnold’s film, beautifully shot by cinematographer Robbie Ryan (Red Road, Brick Lane) is meant to be a piece of stark social realism. The tangled and increasingly complex relationship that develops between Mia and Connor is both disturbing and devastating, with a certain amount of sympathy allowed to both characters.

Mia is a unique character on film and Jarvis brings strength and fragility to her performance. While she has an excellent supporting cast, this film’s success is predominately on the back of Jarvis, who had never acted before. So the story goes Jarvis was spotted on a train station platform in Essex, by a casting agent for Arnold. Jarvis caught the agent’s eye because she was having a heated argument with her boyfriend at the time. A little bit of fate, maybe, but the end result is an amazingly powerful and immersing film. Not finely polished like a big budget film, Fish Tank’s ability to connect with audiences is reflected in the multiple awards the film, its director and its star have received.

First Published on Trespass
Posted by Beth at 10:00 AM

http://polivision.blogspot.com/2010/05/fish-tankan-education.html

Friday, May 28, 2010
Fish Tank/An Education


As a former film major, I can recognize a good essay topic when I see one. Coming soon to a cinematic gender studies class at a university near you, some enterprising young film student will concoct a piece titled "Swimming Upstream: Portrayals Of British Femininity In Opposition To A Male-Dominated Culture In Fish Tank And An Education." Hell, maybe they can even toss a Jane Austen film in there to really connect it up through the ages. (I'm well aware that this title sucks, by the way. The worst parts of my papers were always my titles...at least, that's what I tell myself. My professors might've argued otherwise.) The long and short of is that Fish Tank and An Education tell remarkably similar stories in very different fashions. Both films are about teenage women growing up in England, falling for older men, and trying to carve a niche for themselves in a world that doesn't seem to want to make room for them. Now, not being a young woman growing up in England, I can't really directly relate to the situation, so therefore my opinion of both movies is largely coloured by how believable I found the heroine's predicament.

Fish Tank director Andrea Arnold avoids this problem rather elegantly, which is probably the only time you'll see that word used in conjunction with this purposely inelegant film. Whereas you're supposed to like and sympathize with Jenny, it's much harder to like Mia, the combative, somewhat ferocious, lower-class would-be dancer from the modern-day Essex projects who will just as soon as headbutt you as look at you. (She actually does headbutt someone in the first five minutes of the movie. It's awesome.) Katie Jarvis doesn't so much say Mia's lines as she does spit them out. It's a charmless performance, but hardly an unsympathetic one. Mia's situation is so dire, in fact, that you can't help but feel sorry for her. The stakes are a lot higher in Fish Tank than in An Education. The worst thing that can happen to Jenny is that she might have to enroll in school again or re-take her A-Level tests. The worst thing that can happen to Mia is, well lord, you name it. The feeling of impending dread is always near, and the fact that Mia's only avenue of escape is her modest goal of being a hip-hop dancer underscores the lack of options open to her given her family situation, upbringing and class.

It all culminates with a stunning sequence that takes place at the home of Mia's mother's boyfriend Connor, played by Michael Fassbender. Mia shows up at the house uninvited and discovers something about Connor. What follows is about 10-15 minutes of pure tension since Mia chooses to vent her anger in a potentially frightening way, and you wonder just where the movie is going with this. "Fish Tank" is not perfectly filmed, but wow, this sequence just might be the most suspenseful scene I've seen in a while. I'm being sparse on the details here, which is a sign of endorsement in itself --- with An Education, I don't mind spoiling parts, but with Fish Tank I want you to see it for yourself.

While I do prefer Fish Tank as a movie, it's a narrower call than you might think given how much I've ragged on An Education. The latter film is slicker, tells its story in a smoother way and the performances do a lot to carry the predictable story. Fish Tank is shot in almost a documentary style, leading to long stretches where you'll be checking your watch. I dare say it all pays off given that great scene at Connor's house, but it's a bit of a slog to get there. There's also a subplot about a horse that's pretty pointless. An Education is more entertaining but you'll forget about it five minutes after you leave the theatre, whereas Fish Tank isn't as easy to get into but it'll make you think more. Put it this way: if you actually do find that hypothetical essay linking these two films, the student will probably spend five pages on Scherfig's movie and 10 pages on Arnold's movie. And if the phrase 'compare and contrast' is used in the introduction, then brother, that's going to be one lazily-written essay.

http://thebrag.wordpress.com/2010/05/31/film-review-fish-tank/

Film Review: Fish Tank
By The Brag

Film
Fish Tank
Released May 27

Katie Jarvis in Fish Tank.
Set within the same socio-economic ballpark as Harry Brown’s housing estates, Fish Tank looks like a picnic by comparison. Whereas Daniel Barber shows us the hellish underbelly of London’s infamous ‘Elephant and Castle’, rife with pitiless violence, underage prostitution and the pointy end of the drug trade, Andrea Arnold is more interested in the casual neglect that afflicts a large swathe of the UK’s youth; and Fish Tank is a far richer film in terms of character and construction.

Mia (newcomer Katie Jarvis) is fifteen, a highschool drop-out, and pops cans of lager like most kids her age pop cola. She lives in a tiny flat in a housing estate, with her booze-soaked mother Joanne (Kierston Wareing) and younger sister Tyler. In her spare time Mia sneaks off to an abandoned neighbouring high-rise and practises her dance moves – relentlessly. Her one spark of sunshine is the promise of a better life that this one talent holds forth.

As with her Oscar-winning short Wasp and her Cannes-winning debut feature Red Road (both visions of women surviving the physical and emotional minefields of life in a low-income and high-crime urban jungle), Arnold excels as a storyteller within this territory. Bolstered by Katie Jarvis’ incredibly natural performance, the director creates a heroine who is vulnerable, cheeky, tough and fragile – no mere cipher; even the film’s most potent symbol (the horse chained-up in an abandoned lot) feels natural, rather than laboured.

Fish Tank is most confronting when it explores the usually-taboo area of underage sex. When Joanne brings home Connor (Michael Fassbender – Hunger), a laid-back lover twice Mia’s age, awakening sexuality and desire for a father figure push Mia into his arms; the emotional fall-out for mother and daughter pushes the teen to make a tough decision, at a turning point in her life.

Mercifully, Arnold’s mood is optimistic; Mia is a survivor, with 150% spunk – despite a total lack of parental affirmations and institutional guidance. When she is unexpectedly put in her mother’s position, Mia manages to make better decisions. Mia’s life might be bleak, but things are definitely looking up.

4/5 Dee Jefferson

http://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/movies/fish-tank-20100528-wj9z.html

Fish Tank
SANDRA HALL
May 29, 2010

Reviewer rating:

Rating: 35 out of 5 stars

A tough teen struggles to fulfil her dream.

Fifteen year-old Mia and her mother, Joanne, have taken to shoving one another in passing like two prison inmates who have been penned up together for too long.

Mia's on friendlier terms with her little sister and her dog. Otherwise, she doesn't relate to anybody much. Rather than communicating, she collides with those around her, pacing furiously along the streets looking for trouble.
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She's tough and so is Andrea Arnold's film. The winner of last year's Cannes Jury Prize, it looks as though it has been scooped up raw from the Essex council estate where it was shot. This is a place where the sun shines without warmth on isolated tower blocks rising above the wastelands bordering the Essex estuary. To one side are marshes, ponds and scrubby trees; on the other, the flat concrete expanses of the estates.

The film's star, Katie Jarvis, is a local who had no acting experience when Arnold auditioned her after seeing her on a railway platform engaged in a spirited argument with her boyfriend. Kierston Wareing, who plays Joanne, has had more screen experience. A tousled blonde with a pout and a cool stare, she's done a lot of television. She's also honed her talent for playing hard women in It's a Free World, a Ken Loach film made three years ago.

Arnold has a lot in common with Loach, sharing his urge to combine the shapeliness of fiction with the rough textures of working-class life in modern Britain - although working-class doesn't really describe the people these two make films about. Some of their characters only dream about getting a job. Others have given up all thought of trying.

Mia is young enough to have some hope. She loves to dance and silently cherishes an ambition to make a living at it.

Naturally, she dances alone. In one of Fish Tank's opening scenes, she pulls up in front of a group of girls who are showing off their moves to a couple of boys and she stands watching for a while, her lip curled in contempt. Their hip-swinging chorus line is not to her taste. Her style has no coquetry. For her, dancing is a safety valve. When she's giving herself up to the music she loves, her anger dissipates and the world has a slightly cheerier hue.

But for most of the time, resentment gets the better of her. In fact, Arnold works so hard at making her unbearable, she risks being reduced to a case study.

She softens, however, when Connor (Hunger's Michael Fassbender), Joanne's latest boyfriend, arrives on the scene. For the first time in her life, Mia finds someone who is prepared to listen to her and, for a while, Arnold allows you to entertain the possibility that his interest in her is - and will remain - purely benevolent. Fassbender's performance gives us a personable, intuitive Irishman, who quickly becomes aware of the poisonous state of Joanne's relationship with her daughter and seems prepared to do something about it.

He includes Mia and her little sister in his outings with their mother and seems to understand why Mia is such a loner. But when the inevitable happens and she develops a crush on him, benevolence is soon transformed into something more self-serving.

There are times when Arnold comes close to making a fetish out of the uninflected style she employs. Mia walks - or, more often, runs - into one predicament after another, with the camera keeping a dispassionate distance as though it's merely curious to see what she's going to do next. And on most of these occasions, you can see what's coming long before she does. She fetches up at the dance audition, for instance, in the naive belief that it may actually promise the chance she's been looking for. To us, however, it's already clear that the only prospect is her humiliation.

The film's air of detachment drums up an acute and growing sense of menace - especially in the second half as her frustrations spark the kind of impetuousness that seems certain to end in disaster. One such incident flares up beside some caravans parked on an unlovely stretch of flatland near the estate. She finds a skinny horse chained up and with implacable determination, tries to set it free, regardless of a gang of louts who stand by, picking their moment to jump her.

It's an uncompromising film, although Arnold extends a few small mercies. She has a way of pulling back from the brink before tragedy can accelerate into catastrophe.

Her sense of detachment melts away when she's dealing with Mia's little sister, Tyler (Rebecca Griffiths), whose welfare, like that of the family's dog, depends so much on the feckless human beings around her. And while Mia is no innocent, her desperation has a pathos of its own, stemming as it does from an urge to make something of herself.

And finally, there's the potent reminder that underpins the whole story - of the damage that adults inflict on the young when they no longer take the trouble to care.

http://www.cathnews.com/article.aspx?aeid=21629

Home // June 1 2010 > Film review - Fish Tank

Film review - Fish Tank
Published: June 01, 2010

“Life’s a bitch” chants the rap singer behind the end credits of Fish Tank, and for once a closing song captures perfectly the theme and mood of the movie that has gone before.

Named Outstanding British Film at this year’s BAFTA Awards and winner of the Jury Prize at Cannes last year, it is a piercing, confronting but ultimately absorbing study of adolescence at the lower end of the socio-economic scale in present-day Britain.

Writer-director Andrea Arnold is coolly impartial in her study of a 15-year-old girl dealing with the unforgiving realities of life in a depressing environment where there isn’t a moral compass in sight.

It feels like a documentary. There is no “acting” artifice anywhere to be seen. Katie Jarvis, who plays the pivotal role of Mia, has never been in front of a camera before, and was “discovered” by Arnold having a fight with a boyfriend on a railway station.

Mia is a school dropout for whom life is mainly conducting screaming matches with her slatternly mother and younger sister. In the first few minutes of the film Mia lets fly with all the choice four-letter words and implants a Liverpool kiss (head-butt) on a girl because she doesn’t like the way she dances. Jane Austen it ain’t.

The film is not for the faint-hearted and there are no easy solutions to the problems it depicts. The fish tank of the title is, one supposes, a metaphor for the way Mia feels helplessly confined in an environment where she just goes around and around with no chance of escape.

But a faint glimmer of hope at the end offers at least a modicum of relief from the bleakness of her existence - Jim Murphy, Australian Catholic Office for Film & Broadcasting.

Starring Katie Jarvis, Michael Fassbender, Kierston Wareing and Rebecca Griffiths. Directed by Andrea Arnold. Rated MA15+ (strong themes, sex scenes and coarse language). 118 mins.

http://matchcuts.wordpress.com/2010/05/30/fish-tank-arnold-2010/

Critical Juxtapositions On Film
Fish Tank (Arnold, 2010)

In Andrea Arnold’s lethargic sophomore effort Fish Tank, subtle winds of change blow 15-year-old Mia (Katie Jarvis) from casual teen angst into seriously disappointed adulthood. Throughout the tonally schizophrenic narrative, Mia’s rocky coming of age moments (disappointing relationships, serious father issues, fractured identity) barb the quietest sections of the film with overblown confrontations between key players. Despite Mia’s undeniable need to transcend situational conflict, her trial and error learning curve ultimately flops around like the film’s simplistic centralized metaphor – a plump fish plucked from a country river left to waste on her family’s dirty kitchen floor. Unfortunately, Mia’s elongated plight produces only knee high symbolism.

The social scales tip against Mia from the very beginning, as she loses (or alienates) a best friend and relentlessly battles with her promiscuous single mother Joanne (Kierston Wareing). To complicate things, Joanne begins seeing a charming stranger named Connor (Michael Fassbender), a tender bloke who might be slightly morally askew. Arnold treats early interactions between Mia and Connor with exciting urgency, clouding the air with the drowsy tangents and fanciful innuendo. As they spend more time together, Mia’s perception of Connor begins to dangerously coagulate, clogging the reality of their relationship with dangerous gusts of emotion. Mia’s consciousness often screeches to a halt as Connor becomes part father figure, part love interest, all poison for her impressionable state of mind. Arnold makes certain we understand this layered connection, using slow motion and heightened sound design to lyrically construct fleeting moments. In one particularly beautiful sequence, Connor tends to a gash on Mia’s foot during a countryside day trip, Arnold favoring the sensuality of elements (blood, water), instantly pushing the film into emotional overdrive. Close-ups of Connor’s masculine figure and Mia’s stricken face merge together, creating an unnatural poetry to a relationship destined to come crashing down.

Friendship, family, and community represent Mia’s own version of the Medieval stocks, institutions trapping her in a relentless vice of uncertainty and unrest. As with her breakthrough film Red Road, Arnold stalks her tormented heroine around every corner, through windowpanes, and from various vantage points surrounding the low rent London projects of the film’s setting. But the visual precision and menace of that film has all but vanished in Fish Tank, replaced by a messy handheld scattering of stagnant high rises, cramped mechanical dumps, and lonely dirt fields. Lyrical parallels to Mia’s bursting humanity and hope jump out amidst this volatile world, like the image of an old mare chained in the center of a junkyard, or when Mia’s younger sister eases her head out the car window to soak in the fresh air of the lush countryside. Mia’s salvation resides in the details, yet Arnold can’t muster enough of them to making a lasting impact.

Fish Tank exists primarily to explore Mia’s need for connection, be it with another human being, her passion for hip-hop, or nature itself. But Arnold shoves Mia toward a tragic shift in motivation during the last act, and the film’s various themes come to fruition rather haphazardly as a result. Fish Tank doesn’t bare enough teeth to make these potential conclusions valid, and Arnold seems content merely suggesting them instead of completely darkening her protagonist’s desires. If Red Road signfyed a talented filmmaker grappling with the dark interior motivations behind torturous guilt and retribution, Fish Tank submerges these considerations in a leaden vessel anchored by burdensome trauma, suffocating under the pressure of its own superficial surface.

do you get bord of tiping

tiping?

You mean typing? lol...

I don't have to type these. I just cut and paste.

http://blogs.crikey.com.au/cinetology/2010/06/02/fish-tank-movie-review-social-realism-with-purpose-and-conviction/

Fish Tank movie review: social realism with purpose and conviction
June 2, 2010 – 8:16 am, by Luke Buckmaster

Fish TankGreen light“Social realism” might be a term the general movie going populace associate with “snoresville” or “say wha?” but every once in a while a social realist film comes along with broad appeal, minimal arty farty wankerism and an ability to match aching realism with compelling drama.

Director Andrea Arnold’s tensely told British kitchen sink drama, Fish Tank, won the Jury Prize at last year’s Cannes Film Festival and is an exemplary example of character-based storytelling.

Arnold follows at an intensely personal proximity a wily 15-year-old trouble maker, Mia (Kate Jarvis), who drinks regularly, is in trouble with the law and develops a questionable relationship with her mother’s new beau Connor (Michael Fassbender). The relationship between them consumes much of the film and is a sensitively handled mixture of quasi father/daughter dynamic and uneasy sexual energy.

The actors in Fish Tank chip in top shelf performances. The film heralds a major breakthrough for newcomer Kate Jarvis, who textures Mia with unflinching boldness and bulldozes her way into the audience’s consciousness. Jarvis’s gutsy performance takes a potentially stereotyped character - a renegade, uncontrollable youth in rebellion – and fills it out with layers upon layers of complexity. The subtle details of Jarvis’s acting exist somewhere intangible, between beats of the heart, and it’s a triumph to watch her character slowly grow.

Fish Tank builds its power gradually. A dramatic chunk at the end, which launchs suddenly and unexpectedly, capturing a consequence of Connor and Mia’s relationship, is a squeamish stretch of film but not in a crass or gory sense. It prompts a kind of dramatic plea between the audience and Mia: please, please, don’t let this happen.

A plotline about Mia’s desire to be a dancer provides a vague hint of “you can do it!” underdog inspiration, albeit a billion or two universes removed from Flashdance (1983) or Billy Elliott (2000). Boogies and booze (often in unison) are Mia’s only hobbies, and she longs to become a professional dancer. The audition scene in which she confronts her dream is indicative of Arnold’s approach: bold but understated, balanced by matter-of-fact realism fused with startling emotional gravity that rises like a burst of steam in your face. We feel its effects in a place where out guts and hearts collide.

Only a kooky last minute shot threatens to upset Fish Tank’s ironclad sense of purpose, conviction and realism. It’s only a few seconds long but long enough to smack of a half-mad attempt to crow bar into the running time last minute visual symbolism, the kind that serves as an aphrodisiac for snobby film critic wannabes. Shave those seconds off and you’ve got one intensely focused film.

Fish Tank’s Australian theatrical release date: May 27, 2010.

http://film-guff.blogspot.com/2010/06/tale-of-two-fishies-part-1.html

Tuesday, 1 June 2010
A Tale Of Two Fishies (Parts 1&2)

Fish Tank (2009) Writer/Director: Andrea Arnold

Andrea Arnold established herself four years ago (after winning a short film Oscar for Wasp) with Red Road, the murky thriller set in a Glasgow residential high-rise. It was a startling debut with excellent central performances and a story that had you hooked from start to finish. Her 2009 follow up Fish Tank manages to create a different but equally nightmarish story based in a high rise council estate that still grips from start to finish.

It centres around 15 yr old Mia, a troubled girl that has been expelled from school and spends her days practising street dancing whilst drinking cider. She has no friends and seems to incite trouble wherever she goes. Things are not helped by the lack of any decent parenting from her layabout mother. Then things change when her mum starts seeing Connor, a charming Irishman that shows kindness to Mia, her mother and baby sister. He encourages Mia to go to a local audition for dancing jobs after seeing her perform and his support makes Mia confused towards his feelings for her, and vice versa. Sadly things take a turn for the worse when Connor puts Mia's mum to bed and gets drunk on vodka. Mia goes downstairs and ends up dancing her new routine for Connor. Then one thing leads to another....

Fish Tank bravely plants itself in morally ambiguous area's. For one thing would anything have happened had Mia not went downstairs to Connor, knowing her Mum was unlikely to waken from her drunken coma? She is not blameless in this but she is still under-age and vulnerable and Connor feeds off this, mixing up easy going charm and kindness with almost stomach turningly subtle flirting. Michael Fassbender yet again proves what a phenomenal actor he is, channelling such a charming malevolence throughout the film until he makes his disgraced escape. However the lion share of the plaudits must go to the wonderful Katie Jarvis for her powder keg performance as Mia. Simmering on the edge of a breakdown throughout, the outward vitriol masking what at heart is just a young girl needing someone who actually cares is brutally savage, heart breaking and spellbinding to watch. Sure it is a little strange how easy Mia finds Connor after his disappearing act and maybe her form of cack handed revenge was a tad over the top and potentially cruel but all that is forgotten with the heart breaking audition scene, when she realises exactly what kind of dancers the club is looking for. It ends on what could be called an uplifting note (Mia's goodbye to her sister stays true to the outward spikiness but hidden sentiment of the film) but you will not forget what has went on before. Not an easy film to get out of your head but it features one of the most dangerous, and best film pairings of recent times.

4/5

http://www.abc.net.au/atthemovies/txt/s2899468.htm

Fish Tank

A volatile 15 year old girl finds it difficult to live with her mother and new lover.

Margaret: three-and-a-half stars David: three-and-a-half stars
Fish Tank

Rated MA

Review by David Stratton

In FISH TANK, 15-year-old Mia, KATIE JARVIS, lives with her mother, Joanne, KIERSTON WAREING, and little sister Tyler, REBECCA GRIFFITHS, in a flat on a council estate near London. Apparently expelled from school, Mia is hostile towards the other girls in the neighbourhood; she's consumed with the idea that she wants to be a dancer, and she practices her moves in an abandoned flat near her home. When her mother's new lover, Connor, MICHAEL FASSBENDER, starts staying overnight, Mia is intrigued and attracted...

Andrea Arnold's second feature takes us into that bleak world of the British housing estate where everyone is depressed and bored and where every other word spoken is of the four-letter variety. The story of Mia, and her growing involvement with her mother's lover, is a disturbing one - Mia is underage, even though she'd like to think she's a young adult.

It's a story not that much different in basic content from A TASTE OF HONEY, which Tony Richardson filmed in 1962 and in which a daughter, RITA TUSHINGHAM, also chafed at her mother, DORA BRYAN'S, relationships; but the world has changed a lot in nearly 50 years and Mia's world is far more brutal, and pitiless. The symbolic white horse tethered nearby might represent a taste of freedom - but it's a forlorn one. Performances are excellent but this is an exceptionally grim experience.

cant spell

That's ok, sometimes it takes me a while to figure out what you are saying.

Do you speak Gaelic?

http://sergioleoneifr.blogspot.com/2010/06/not-quite-lost-art-of-double-bill.html

The coming of age tale is one well and often told by the movies, in the classic era and of late. Two recent examples are highlighted at the New Beverly on June 18 & 19. Lone Scherfig’s Academy-award nominated An Education (2009) was a film I didn’t much like, but it has a performance by Carey Mulligan at its center that is interesting and compelling. Unfortunately, Mulligan cannot defeat the movie’s creepy acceptance and perpetration of its characters’ most vile anti-Semitism. Another British coming of age drama, this one set in an economically depressed modern Britain, looks more promising. Fish Tank (2009) tells the story of a 15-year-old girl who becomes attracted to her mother’s handsome boyfriend (Michael Fassbender). This is a movie that is an unknown quantity to me, but it come s highly recommended, and truly anything with Michael Fassbender in it should be worth a look.

http://www.thestar.com/entertainment/dvd/movie/article/820216--fish-tank-still-waters-become-rapids

Fish Tank: Still waters become rapids
Desire stirs up a British council flat in impressive style
Published On Mon Jun 07 2010

By Peter Howell Movie Critic

Fish Tank

(Mongrel Media)

(3.5 out of 4)

Newcomer Katie Jarvis excels in the role of Mia, a terse 15-year-old living in British council-flat hell who is a study in repressed rage — at least until the arrival of her mother’s new boyfriend.

The film has the contours of a coming-of-age saga, although it’s not a conventional one. Andrea Arnold’s follow-up to Red Road, her harrowing surveillance drama, further demonstrates the British writer/director’s late-reveal style of filmmaking that’s grounded in strong character development.

Mia lives with blousy mother Joanne (Kierston Wareing) and younger sister Tyler (Rebecca Griffiths) in a crowded public housing flat. She isn’t attending school, and her problems with substance abuse and anger aren’t being addressed.

She has a talent for dancing and a hunger to get better — but money and inspiration are in shorter supply than compassion and caring.

Then mom brings home new boyfriend Connor (Michael Fassbender), a hunk with a ready smile and a roving eye.

Mia finds herself both attracting and reciprocating feelings of desire. There will be a temptation to judge Fassbender’s character, since Mia is a year younger than the British age of sexual consent.

But Connor isn’t completely without conscience, as he shows in an interlude where he takes the entire family on a Sunday drive. He is as caught up in the moment as Mia is, and he lives in a neighbourhood where rough justice is the only law that anybody knows.

Fish Tank attains aspects of a thriller. But at all times it remains a solid character study about lonely and desperate people, who seek only to escape the invisible glass walls that surround them.

The scant extras includes Andrea Arnold’s Oscar-winning short film Wasp and a photo gallery.

http://www.kryztoff.com/fringeraw/?p=454

RAW: Film – Fish Tank – 4K

Angry Mia (Katie Jarvis) lives in a nasty, soul destroying British housing estate. She has dysfunctional relationships with everybody from her family to girls her own age. At 15, she faces dilemmas over whether to pursue her dancing or go to a special school desired by her mother but for the moment rage is mostly all that consumes her. All that changes however when her mother (Kierston Wareing) brings home Connor (Michael Fassbender) who promises to inject some love into the home.

This is a highly confronting film where the boundaries of property and person disappear in ways that becoming ever more problematic as the movie progresses. The language is coarse and the cinematography often contributes to the sense of dissonance. Jarvis gives a magnificent performance, mixing both anger and determination to get what she wants. Fassbender’s Prince Charming is totally convincing even though there are persistent worries as to the appropriateness of his relationship with Mia.

The last 15 minutes is deeply unsettling and is as uncomfortable to view at times as say scenes from last year’s Samson & Delilah. The juxtaposition of homely desires – the family picnic, tidy rooms, generosity to all – against the moral vacuity that all the players embrace keeps one engrossed.

Rated as the best British film of the year, Fish Tank is a must see (if you can stomach it.)

Kryztoff Rating 4K

http://www.exclaim.ca/motionreviews/latestsub.aspx?csid1=115&csid2=871&fid1=47146

Fish Tank
Directed by Andrea Arnold
By Christine Estima

Having notably charmed many festival crowds since its UK release last year (Cannes, Chicago, Stockholm, Edinburgh, Motovun, Ireland, London) and winning the creamiest awards (Cannes Jury Prize, Bafta's, British Independent Film Awards), Fish Tank is a dazzling, dynamic, heart-breaking coming-of-age narrative about Mia (newcomer Katie Jarvis, who was cast in this film after a casting director watched her argue with her boyfriend on a train platform), who is an angry 16-year-old Chav from London's dilapidated council flats. Sucked in and spit out by the over-sexed urban culture in which she's saturated, her dysfunctional family, chaired by her ever-drunk, bleached out mum Joanne (Kierston Wareing), enjoys a brief period of harmony when Connor (Michael Fassbender, Inglourious Basterds) comes into their lives. Tempering Mia's adolescent bravado with kindness and encouraging her love of dance, their bond quickly becomes illegal, if you know what I mean. Directed by Oscar-winning Andrea Arnold, two types of film are present here: one of engaging weight and quietly expansive storytelling, and one where the tiniest ruminations become the subject of import. Both are held together by a directorial vision so pure it often stands at odds with Katie Jarvis's propensity toward the wry and suggestive. Scenes of Mia shopping for fizzy drinks at her corner store, dancing in an abandoned flat, trying to free a sick horse, introducing us to a crowd of hoodrats and generously applying mascara will stay with you forever. Bulked up and fleshed out with the weight of Michael Fassbender's sinful eye candy, he adds urgency to what could have been a meandering script that smokes from every syllable he utters. All the better for its imperfections, as disarmingly matter-of-fact as it is idiosyncratic and with a passion so raw, Fish Tank is very fine indeed. (Mongrel Media)

http://filmreviews.net.au/?p=1388

FISH TANK
Posted by Greg on June 10th, 2010

Reviewed by GREG KING
Director: Andrea Arnold

Stars: Katie Jarvis, Kierston Wareing, Michael Fassbender, Harry Treadaway, Rebecca Griffiths.
Fish Tank is the new film from Andrea Arnold, whose previous film was the bleak but powerful drama Red Road a couple of years ago. This hard-hitting but very human film won the jury prize at Cannes last year, and premiered at MIFF in 2009.

This coming of age tale is set against the backdrop of one of those grim and claustrophobic high rise housing estates in England. It is home to Mia (played by newcomer Katie Jarvis), and angry and troubled fifteen-year old girl, a misfit and a loner who is generally considered the scourge of the estate. She is into music and dancing, but is constantly at loggerheads with her mother Joanne (played by Kierston Wareing, from Trial And Retribution, etc). Joanne is a smoker and heavy drinker, who is constantly looking for a good time and some male companionship.

When she brings home her new boyfriend Connor (Michael Fassbender, from Inglorious Basterds and Hunger, etc) the already toxic atmosphere in their small confined flat becomes even more combustible. There is an immediate attraction between Connor and the rebellious Mia, and he takes advantage of it. The fatal attraction between the pair leads Mia down a dangerous path.

With its natural performances, its gritty realism and its depressing working class setting, Fish Tank quickly develops a similar vibe to the films of Ken Loach. However, there is a great deal of unexpected humour to be found beneath the grim surface. Arnold apparently shot the film in chronological order.

She only gave the cast the script they would be shooting a week at time so as to ensure that element of surprise at what was happening to their characters.

Jarvis hails from a very similar background and shares a few parallels with Mia. She inhabits her character completely, and gives a very credible, natural and uninhibited performance as the angry rebel without a cause. Wareing is also very good as Mia’s alcoholic mother. And Fassbender continues to impress, delivering another rich and complex performance here.
***1/2

http://www.trespassmag.com/review-fish-tank/

Review: Fish Tank
By Beth Wilson on May 25, 2010 in Featured, Film, Reviews, Women's

British film, Fish Tank, the sophomore feature film from director Andrea Arnold (Red Road), was originally scheduled to be released in Australia in March, but distributors were forced to move the films theatrical release to May 27th. For once this serious rescheduling is a positive sign. When Fish Tank won Outstanding British Film at the BAFTAS in February this year, the film’s season in British cinemas was extended and expanded, so there simply weren’t enough prints of the film to be sent to Australia.

It is always good to hear that a small budget film has been given an opportunity to reach a wider audience, and even though it has meant a delay for Australian audiences, most will agree this incredible film was worth the wait.

Set in and around an Essex Estate in South England, this film focuses on 15 year old Mia (newcomer, Katie Jarvis) and the impact her mum’s new relationship has on her. Set in the same sort of council estates as shown in the recently released Harry Brown, instead of stereotyping the lippy and troublesome Mia as a juvenile delinquent with homicidal tendencies- the marching-song propaganda of British tabloids – Arnold shows how vulnerable the seemingly bolshy and aggressive teenagers who live in these housing project truly are.

Living with her single mum, Joanne (Kierston Wareing) and younger, more sociable sister, Tyler (a fabulous performance from newcomer, Rebecca Griffiths), Mia has been excluded from school and spends her days wandering the estate, drinking cheap booze and practicing her dance routines. Both quick-witted and quick-tempered, Mia isn’t a pleasant teenager, but then she doesn’t seem to have any adults that particularly care how she is or what she does, that is until Connor (Michael Fassbender, 300, Inglourious Basterds) turns up.

Connor, Joanne’s new boyfriend, brings a whole new dynamic into Mia’s life, he not only notices her, but he also seems interested in her, what she thinks and what she does. Connor is like no-one Mia has met before, he has a steady job and a car and he like to get out of the city into the countryside.

Arnold’s film, beautifully shot by cinematographer Robbie Ryan (Red Road, Brick Lane) is meant to be a piece of stark social realism. The tangled and increasingly complex relationship that develops between Mia and Connor is both disturbing and devastating, with a certain amount of sympathy allowed for both characters.

Mia is a unique character on film and Jarvis brings strength and fragility to her performance. While she has an excellent supporting cast, this film’s success is predominately on the back of Jarvis, who had never acted before. So the story goes Jarvis was spotted on a train station platform in Essex, by a casting agent for Arnold. Jarvis caught the agent’s eye because she was having a heated argument with her boyfriend at the time. A little bit of fate, maybe, but the end result is an amazingly powerful and immersing film. Not finely polished like a big budget film, Fish Tank’s ability to connect with audiences is reflected in the multiple awards the film, its director and its star have received.

Fish Tank is released nationally in Australia on the 27th May.

http://charisse-movierevue.blogspot.com/2010/06/fish-tank.html

17 June, 2010
Fish Tank

Teenage girl Mia (actress Katie Jarvis) and her younger sister have the misfortune of being brought up by an uncaring 30's something mother who is far more concerned with 'hooking up' with the next eligible guy than caring for her own children.

The premise of this film reminds me of the 2004 Japanese film, "Nobody Knows", where the mother in this film is also lacking in the parenting department, and nabs a rich husband abandoning her family altogether.

Young Mia has some spunk though and sets about trying to pursue her dream of being a dancer. Along the way she find's herself caught up in the relationship between her mother and new boyfriend Connor, actor Michael Fassbender. Michael's character Connor appears to be the cool, hip Dad that Mia and her sister have always wanted. With his charm and ease around others, Connor is able to slowly break through barriers Mia has surrounded herself with and in one foul swoop ruin's this trust.

Hypnotic moments occur when we watch Mia dancing in an abandoned housing estate as we hear the music she dances to and are also swept off into her world. A saviour does appear in the form of her friend one of the keeper's of an abandoned old grey mare. It's at these moments we see Mia's tender side as she tries to rescue the animal.

Typically 'real' in the way that only British cinema can do this genre, we are left with a bleak portrait of Mia's life but also a sense that everything will be ok as Mia proves to us that she can recognise faults in the world and others and is not going to stand for it.

See: MovieRevue - http://charisse-movierevue.blogspot.com/

Posted by Charisse at 8:56 PM
Labels: "Nobody Knows", Japanese film, Katie Jarvis, Michael Fassbender