Fish Tank

Fish Tank (2009) follows Mia, a 15-year-old who lives with her mother and younger sister in a social housing block in Essex. Rebellious, solitary and with an explosive temper, she has been expelled from school and spends her days alone, dreaming of becoming a hip-hop dancer and practising routines in an empty flat in her block. Her life changes when Connor, her mother’s new boyfriend, moves in. Attractive and attentive in a way Mia is not used to, he becomes an ambiguous figure for her: a kind of surrogate father, but also the object of a confused and growing desire. We might recall that this is a film that holds up a mirror. Its director, Andrea Arnold, was born in 1961 in Dartford, Kent, England. She grew up in a working-class family, raised by a young mother — an upbringing that leaves an autobiographical imprint on this work. Throughout the narrative, the film follows Mia’s emotional state in an almost immersive way: her anger, loneliness, desire for escape and search for affection in an environment marked by economic and emotional insecurity.

This is, in fact, a film that belongs unequivocally to a very specific lineage of British cinema: the social realism that spans decades in the work of Ken Loach, Mike Leigh and Alan Clarke. Here we find a cinema that treats the working class more as a protagonist than as a backdrop, as in other strands of Western cinema. Clarke, for instance, is known for a raw, violent and unsentimental cinema that denies the viewer any moral consolation. His films almost always centre on young people from the English working class, trapped in cycles of violence, delinquency and oppressive institutions: schools, prisons and reformatories.

Let us return to our film. Fish Tank uses non-professional actors and street casting within a tradition that both adheres to and distances itself from the documentary approach of direct cinema. Its performance style rejects polish, stock phrases and clichés so often created by a romanticising view from outside. In terms of cinematography, the handheld camera and an almost documentary aesthetic produce images that stay close to bodies, without choreographed movements, continuing the visual grammar this cinema has consolidated since the 1960s and 70s around the idea that the camera should bear witness, not compose. The camera pursues characters who seem to elude it. But Fish Tank does not point the finger at any particular policy. It is more concerned with Mia’s subjective experience, her body, desire and anger than with structural critique, adopting an approach that is more sensory than verbal. Arnold seems to place more trust in the image, sound and the body in motion (Mia’s dancing) than in words. This is, in fact, a woman director filming female adolescence within the tradition of coming-of-age cinema. The sensory quality of Fish Tank comes above all from formal choices that make the viewer feel Mia’s experience: the enclosed, almost square 4:3 aspect ratio creates a physical sense of constriction and confinement, turning the screen itself into a fish tank. Indeed, the film’s very title seems to offer a key to the work and a central metaphor. Mia, the protagonist, lives in a social housing block, an enclosed, repetitive space she seems unable to leave. Her life unfolds in cramped settings (the family flat, the corridor where she dances, the neighbourhood itself) that act as transparent but impassable glass walls. She sees the world outside through the television screens at home, but feels trapped in a space she cannot escape, just as a fish in a tank can see the world beyond without being able to reach it. She is also constantly being watched, assessed and judged, whether by her mother, the neighbours, the school or Connor, with little control over the space around her. The desire for escape that runs through the film, culminating in her final departure for ‘somewhere’, can be read as the desire to get out of the tank, to break through the glass that keeps her confined to a fate that seems predetermined by her social class and the place where she was born.

Indeed, the restless handheld camera, which clings to Mia without giving her room to breathe, conveys anxiety and a lack of freedom more through the movement of the image than through dialogue or a kind of narrative factuality. Fish Tank does not break with British social realism, following almost all of its formal and thematic conventions. What distinguishes it within this tradition is the replacement of the political lens with a sensory one: Arnold inherits the method, but uses it to film a teenage girl’s inner life, not to make an argument about the state. It is social realism, but with its centre of gravity shifted from society to the body.