UK | 2009
124 minutes
Director/Screenplay: Andrea Arnold
Producers: Kees Kasander, Nick Laws
Photography: Robbie Ryan
Editor: Nicolas Chauderge
Production designer: Helen Scott
Costume designer: Jane Petrie
With: Katie Jarvis, Michael Fassbender, Kierston Wareing, Rebecca Griffiths, Harry Treadaway, Sydney Mary Nash
Festivals: Cannes (In Competition), Edinburgh, Karlovy Vary, Toronto, Pusan 2009
Jury Prize, Cannes Film Festival 2009
Best British Film, BAFTA Awards 2010
Censors rating tbc
With Fish Tank in competition at Cannes last year writer/director Andrea Arnold clinched her place as the bright new hope of British cinema. Eschewing the narrative shocks of her earlier Red Road, she shows us the world through the eyes of a wild suburban teen. Fifteen year-old Mia is growing up fast – and channeling a powerstation of pent-up frustration into bedroom dance breaks. Love and beauty exist in teasingly short supply for Mia, but men are beginning to pay attention and offer something like tenderness. Arnold coaxes a performance of startling, utterly credible emotion from Katie Jarvis, an instant screen star whom she famously discovered on an Essex train platform yelling at her boyfriend. In the best Mike Leigh/Ken Loach tradition, Mia lives in an estate on the city fringe with her single mum Joanne, played by Kierston Wareing (It’s a Free World) and her lippy little sister Tyler (scene-stealing Rebecca Griffiths). The remarkable chameleon Michael Fassbender (Hunger) is oh so plausible as the dramatic catalyst, Joanne’s latest boyfriend, handsome, charming and ominously eager to prove the perfect stepdad to the girls.
“Fish Tank is a powerfully acted drama, beautifully photographed by cinematographer Robbie Ryan, who intersperses bleak interiors with sudden, gasp-inducing landscapes like something by Turner... Arnold takes elements of tough social-realist drama which are, if not cliches exactly, then certainly familiar – but makes them live again... The performances of Jarvis and Fassbender are outstanding and their chemistry fizzes – and then explodes. It is another highly intelligent, involving film from one of the most powerful voices in British cinema.” — Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian
“I was gripped by Arnold’s compelling account of lives on the edge... Above all the film creates a world of terror, mystery and occasional delight that’s far from mere sociology or miserabilism.” — Ian Christie, Sight & Sound
“Fish Tank may begin as a patch of lower-class chaos, but it turns into a commanding, emotionally satisfying movie, comparable to such youth-in-trouble classics as The 400 Blows.” — David Denby, New Yorker
“Beautiful and immensely powerful… This is British cinema at its best.” —Miranda Collinge, Esquire
“It’s a current and universal parable on the very dark
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