Fish Tank Review...

"Not since the early days of Jane Campion (The Piano) has international cinema seen a talent as fearlessly attuned to the primal female voice as the Dartford-born writer-director Andrea Arnold. Within the space of only two features and one Oscar-winning short film (Wasp), Arnold has articulated an unnerving, bleak but always compelling worldview where hard-knock women and sado-masochistic desires collide. In her previous feature, Red Road, she pitched an avenging widow into a Glasgow tower block and a murky world of sexual self-hatred. In Fish Tank, she moves to an Essex council estate and explores the often conflicting inner and outer desires of a teen tearaway and wannabe street dancer, Mia (Katie Jarvis, pictured).

A typical day in the life of 15-year-old Mia, who has been expelled from school, includes taunting some local girls, head- butting a rival dancer, trying to free a malnourished pony, narrowly escaping gang rape, enjoying some potty-mouthed exchanges with her precocious little sister (sample dialogue: “Shut up f*** face!” “If I’m a f*** face, you’re a c*** face!”), and being slapped across the head by her bleach-blonde mother, who screams: “I nearly had you aborted! Even made the appointment!” So far, so Loach.

But Mia’s life, and the movie surrounding her, suddenly dives into uncharted territory with the arrival of mum’s new boyfriend, a sensitive and attractive security guard called Connor (played by the rising star Michael Fassbender). The latter’s intentions towards Mia are seemingly paternalistic, but they appear to awaken complex adolescent emotions within. Through snatched exchanges, day trips and cramped kitchen encounters, their relationship see-saws queasily into a simmering Electra. Thus when Connor’s appetites and Mia’s minor seductions eventually collide the repercussions are, naturally, profound.

In all this, Arnold draws flawless performances from her cast while making exemplary choices with her camera — she shoots Fassbender in particular with a fantastically lusty eye, casually catching the low-slung jeans, the navel exposed and the wiry naked torso. However, there are some cracks in Arnold’s methods. Her treatment of class is curious, and vaguely patronising. The attempts to draw laughs from trash culture values is certainly ill-advised. When Mia’s mother warns her girls against sullying their clothes with the line “Oi! Those bloody tracksuits cost £20, ye know!” it feels cruel and sneering. And the endless roaming shots of breeze-block estates can seem like lazy visual shorthand for dramatic credibility in a superlative film that is otherwise awash with it."

This is a review about the film Fish Tank written in The Times. The review gives the film a very good standard and has a positive view. The film sounds original and the ideas that are used in the films could be actually happening in real life. The main character Mia sounds like a character that people can relate to for example, her dislike for her mother's boyfriend and the problems she says with her social worker. She is a stereotypical teenager, the review suggests and the she faces problems that normal teenagers would, for example having a dream of becoming a dancer but her family life and status disagree with the practicality of her dream.