Andrea Arnold: Behind Glass

Each of Andrea Arnold’s films (and there have been three shorts, including one Oscar-winner as well as two feature films) have begun in the same way: with a single image. “Normally how I start writing is I have an image that bothers me and I have to go and explore it. It’s a great way of starting because it actually helps me decide what to do. It becomes the thing that won’t leave me alone.” Arnold won’t reveal what that image is for her latest film Fish Tank, but I’d like to hazard a guess. It’s the central protagonist, Mia, sitting alone in an abandoned flat against a backdrop of pale blue. It’s quiet and Mia is out of breath from dancing to the hip hop track on her portable stereo. This is how the film begins, a moment of stillness before erupting into a frenetic, free-flowing sequence which begins when Mia leaves the flat. She watches a group of girls dancing for a moment before launching into an argument with one of them, head-butting another and unleashing a string of expletives in their direction.

Welcome to the chaotic, emotionally-driven world of Fish Tank, a film which bristles with the volatility of teenage hormones. At its centre is 15-year-old Mia, perfectly captured by newcomer Katie Jarvis, who had no acting experience before the shooting of the film. “I really love people who haven’t been on camera before” says Arnold “I think they have an unconsciousness on some level. I think for her [Mia] in particular it was important because I wanted to find someone who was very like the character.” 18-year-old Jarvis was discovered by a casting director in the sort of heated situation we could easily imagine the feisty Mia to be in: shouting at her boyfriend across an Essex train station platform. Along with the rest of the cast, she brings an electrifying presence to the screen. Mia’s mother is played by Kierston Wareing, previously seen in Ken Loach’s It’s a Free World and her boyfriend, Connor, is portrayed by the charismatic Irish actor Michael Fassbender, who was last seen on our screens playing Bobby Sands in Steve McQueen’s astonishing film Hunger.

Like McQueen’s feature, Fish Tank has an arresting visual style. In Arnold’s film this is characterised by the bright colour palette, especially the interior walls which are awash with pastel shades of yellow, blue and pink. “It started with the flats of the Mardyke estate that we filmed on” Arnold explains. “Every block was a pale blue, or green or pink and I just loved it because I found it was quite a vibrant place to be.” The result is a film that continually throws up unexpected, yet breathtaking, images that encourage a new way of seeing the most ordinary of objects, for example the close-up of childhood stickers on a metal bedpost.

The choice of location is equally unique, the concrete slabs which make up the housing estate where the family live is contrasted with the wilds of the Essex marshes which surround it. “I thought about Essex because I’ve known it from when I was a kid and I remember feeling that it had this sort of wildness and space. I had this idea that where she [Mia] lived was sort of like an island. And in Essex, there are lots of estates which have this feeling that they are on their own and surrounded by countryside or wastelands.” Such vivid imagery brings to mind themes of isolation and entrapment, ideas which are also evoked by the film’s abstract title.

Where exactly the name for Fish Tank comes from is unclear, the only real fish tank in the film in fact houses a gerbil. Although Arnold points out that once they decided on the name they saw ‘fish tanks’ everywhere in the film. One shot, taken through the murky glass of a bus shelter, in particular evokes the sense of containment implied by the film’s title. And whilst it certainly taps into the struggles and restraints of working-class life, we don’t get the sense of doomed entrapment that pervades much of British social realist films, something which marks Arnold out among her contemporaries. As with Red Road (Arnold's debut feature), Fish Tank is about people making choices and seizing even the tiniest of opportunities that come their way, it is about people wanting to get out and escape, and succeeding, if only in small steps. Arnold captures these characters and the contradictions they embody in an unflinching yet equally unpatronising way. It is for this reason that her second film comes across as a very human drama yet also refreshing and intelligent in its outlook and as a result should be greeted as a welcome addition to Britain’s latest crop of arthouse films.