Collected Works: Film
Fish Tank
directed by Andrea Arnold
Feature film
Mia is an impulsive fifteen-year-old girl who lives on a London council estate, jostling with her foul-mouthed, tweenage sister and her party-animal mother. When she isn’t wandering about aimlessly or picking fights, she withdraws to the top of her tower block to dance, to practise the act of escapism. While taking a breather, she peers out of the window, considering the world on the other side of the glass. Although she may not know it yet, she longs to break out. Big fish, small tank.
Low-key formal cues belie Mia’s bullish demeanour, revealing her sensitivity to hope. When she first encounters Conor, her mother’s new boyfriend, the lighting is soft and warm. He jokes, shirtless, as the camera lingers in loose focus on his musculature. Later, a deceptive shot suggests that the pair’s facial profiles, in reality a metre apart, are in close proximity. The ambiguity and visual haziness invite the viewer to reconsider Conor’s blurred role as rescuer, underlining the opacity of his agenda.
In the pivotal scene that gives Fish Tank its name, Conor shows Mia how to ‘noodle’, to catch fish barehanded. This is one of the film’s many instances of entrapment. Elsewhere, a horse is chained up next to a caravan. Clothes are torn on a barbed wire fence. A trespasser enters a family home and urinates on the carpeted floor. Where there is liberation, it is neither painless nor permanent. Conor may have made Mia acutely aware of life inside the fish tank, but can he provide a way out?
In a late moment of uncharacteristic solidarity, Mia and her mother dance together to Nas’ ‘Life’s a Bitch’, each mirroring the other’s actions in mutual understanding. The quiet acceptance and familial spontaneity lend the film’s final scenes a sense of fragile calm. Fish Tank’s closing image, of a car exiting the estate as a balloon drifts to the heavens, reassures us that Mia’s bottled-up optimism is not all in vain. Set loose, escaping the confines of her enclosure, she may be free to swim into uncharted territory.
Words by Elizabeth Brown & John Wadsworth
More to discover
You can watch the trailer here, and read interviews with Andrea Arnold and the cast here. Kim Morgan has written about the film and girlhood for Sunset Gun, Gillie Collins has written about landscape and limbo for The Seventh Row. Catherine Grant has made a video essay about the film, 'UN/CONTAINED'.
Question of the day
Which films from 2009 would you recommend, and why?
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A Prophet, directed by Jacques Audiard. Dank, dimly lit prison walls provide an incubator for crime organised from the inside. (→)
– Elizabeth Brown, Silent Frame's Deputy Editor (via Patreon →)
Coraline, directed by Henry Selick. Dank, dimly lit prison walls provide an incubator for crime organised from the inside. (→)
– Lewis Coenen-Rowe, Silent Frame Sub-Editor (via Facebook →)
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