Monday, April 25, 2011

Life’s a bitch—and so’s your mother

Fish Tank 2009 UK (124 minutes) Written and directed by Andrea Arnold.
            It took me a day or two after seeing this movie to realize that someone nearly managed to sneak a ballet by me in plain sight: in case this worries you, this is not a ‘dance picture’.
At first glance, it is a modern coming-of-age story structured along the lines of a British Victorian novel: a teenager progresses linearly through a series of emotional and moral challenges. But this tale is set in a contemporary council estate [public housing] in Essex, east of London, pretty far off the Masterpiece Theatre reservation.
The most striking thing one sees right away of this subculture is that words have little value. People spit words at each other or throw them like punches, and words not spit or punched often seem to express the opposite of what they mean. Televisions run nearly nonstop playing dance videos and babbling buckets of raw verbal nonsense. When someone feels something or has something important to say, she does this in movement and gesture; or she reads and responds to others’ gestures and movements. In a sense, they ‘dance’ all the time, which includes—but is not limited to—shoving, pushing, slapping, kicking, punching, pinching, head butting and wrestling each other. 
The story opens with Mia Williams (Katie Jarvis) in the vacant flat that she uses as her dance studio. It is the summer of her fifteenth year. She is bent over breathing heavily, as though she has been exercising or is concentrating before beginning a new dance routine; she opens up to look straight at the camera.
Ecce puella!
It may be the gray training suit and hoodie she wears, it may be the rap and hip hop music she listens to, but watching Mia dance, especially at first, is a lot like watching a boxer train. It’s in her presentation as much as her display. What Mia wants to do more than anything else is to float like a butterfly and sting like a bee.
Mia lives with her single mom Joanne (Kierston Wareing) and much younger sister Tyler (Rebecca Griffiths). She faces what for anyone besides a teenager with boundless energy and lacking the experience to know better would be a physically exhausting and emotionally intense several weeks. Yet in this short period we get insight into this girl’s life and an idea as to where she might be heading.
She evidently is a ‘discipline problem’ for which she may be sent to a boarding school for ‘sorting out’ in the coming school term. This seems due mainly to her opposition to her alcoholic mother’s parental authority, an opposition she asserts with typically petulant adolescent righteousness. But despite her faults, Joanne is there for Mia; it is clear that both girls expect their mother to be there for them, and that Mia needs her mother as much as she needs to try her and to compete with her.
The actors in this movie seem more choreographed than directed. The scheme is modern, but the choreography, costumes and sets are less minimalist than incidental, and the movie’s threads weave into a whole that tells a story the way a ballet does.
In a sense, there is a princess and an evil queen: the princess is under a spell, but has the resources to break it; there is no king, but the queen has a consort, Connor (Michael Fassbender), a handsome knight—though he could have a dark side too. The princess also has a kind of prince-champion, Billy (Harry Treadaway), a nineteen-year-old whose trusty steed turns out to be not the old hornless unicorn Mia would ride away on, but an old Volvo automobile that Billy is cobbling together with scavenged parts.
            Citing any one scene takes it out of a context hard to explain without dragging in others and spoiling plot points. Part of the marvel of this movie is watching it unfold, showing us this unusual girl who reveals herself to us in motion as she discovers herself. There is also a lot more to the other principal characters than at first meets the eye. 
That said, one afternoon Connor takes Joanne and the girls in his car on a drive to a pond in the country where, with Mia’s help, he catches a fish with his bare hands. On the drive to this place, he puts on a Bobby Womack CD including Womack’s 1968 pop single cover of John and Michelle Phillips’ California Dreamin’.
Mia subsequently works up and practices her own dance steps for California Dreamin’ for an audition she arranges at a ‘top club’ which advertises by flyer that its pays ‘top rates’ for ‘fresh young talent’. The dance she creates does not follow the conventions of hip hop music videos—or anything else. It looks and feels like the kind of personal statement a teenager would make on a college application, except that it is danced rather than written. In a sense, this is exactly what it is: she prepares for and goes to the audition like an adult, but with a child’s wishful hope that it will get her the recognition she so desperately wants, solve her problems and make things right.
The audition speaks for itself. My sense is that this kid on the right track, against all odds. Maybe she will grow up to direct films. What seems to have left the biggest impression on Mia the summer she was fifteen is what she saw from Connor’s example above: you have to get out of the fish tank if you want to catch a fish.
Andrea Arnold tells a terrific story in pictures of bodies in motion, but in case you are squeamish or watch with kids, be advised that there is graphic sex and hefty helpings of physical, sexual, alcohol, child, and free flowing verbal abuse in the spinning of her tale.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ewUt4LM_Fpo (Never mind the French subtitles: the scene sets the tone.)

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