Fish Tank (2009)
Country: NL/GB
Technical: col/1.33:1 123m
Director: Andrea Arnold
Cast: Katie Jarvis, Michael Fassbender, Kierston Wareing
Synopsis:
Growing up with her neglectful mother and younger sister in an Estuary high-rise, 15 year-old Mia has few opportunities beckoning in her life. Without a school life, and having alienated all her friends, she has responded to the absence of love in her life by rolling herself up into a ball, spines out. When her mother's new boyfriend walks into her existence, he represents both a change of direction and yet another rejection.
Review:
Arnold does little to ingratiate her leading character with us, as she tracks her self-destructive progress, Dardennes-like, around her Grays estate, tantalisingly close to leafy countryside, but trapped in a concrete and tarmac anomie of high rise flats and commuter roads. The social ills speak for themselves without need for backstory, and the tinker she befriends on the neighbouring wasteland is equally rootless but seems to hold out some hope of nurture. In the meantime, she must negotiate the Scylla and Charybdis of her mother's charismatic boyfriend and the hopeless ambition of a dancing career which seems all too inevitably a path to further exploitation by men. The film is in a sense beyond criticism: it does what it does very well, both in its ontological central performance and in its épater les bourgeois feast of shocking incident; it screams out loud its indictment of a failed society for all to hear, at the risk of alienating those who need to hear it most, and it does just a little outstay its welcome. Is the final shot of a child's helium balloon drifting free of the estate, whether an emblem of escape or of lost innocence, a misplaced venture into the world of Lamorisse?
Country: NL/GB
Technical: col/1.33:1 123m
Director: Andrea Arnold
Cast: Katie Jarvis, Michael Fassbender, Kierston Wareing
Synopsis:
Growing up with her neglectful mother and younger sister in an Estuary high-rise, 15 year-old Mia has few opportunities beckoning in her life. Without a school life, and having alienated all her friends, she has responded to the absence of love in her life by rolling herself up into a ball, spines out. When her mother's new boyfriend walks into her existence, he represents both a change of direction and yet another rejection.
Review:
Arnold does little to ingratiate her leading character with us, as she tracks her self-destructive progress, Dardennes-like, around her Grays estate, tantalisingly close to leafy countryside, but trapped in a concrete and tarmac anomie of high rise flats and commuter roads. The social ills speak for themselves without need for backstory, and the tinker she befriends on the neighbouring wasteland is equally rootless but seems to hold out some hope of nurture. In the meantime, she must negotiate the Scylla and Charybdis of her mother's charismatic boyfriend and the hopeless ambition of a dancing career which seems all too inevitably a path to further exploitation by men. The film is in a sense beyond criticism: it does what it does very well, both in its ontological central performance and in its épater les bourgeois feast of shocking incident; it screams out loud its indictment of a failed society for all to hear, at the risk of alienating those who need to hear it most, and it does just a little outstay its welcome. Is the final shot of a child's helium balloon drifting free of the estate, whether an emblem of escape or of lost innocence, a misplaced venture into the world of Lamorisse?
Country: NL/GB
Technical: col/1.33:1 123m
Director: Andrea Arnold
Cast: Katie Jarvis, Michael Fassbender, Kierston Wareing
Synopsis:
Growing up with her neglectful mother and younger sister in an Estuary high-rise, 15 year-old Mia has few opportunities beckoning in her life. Without a school life, and having alienated all her friends, she has responded to the absence of love in her life by rolling herself up into a ball, spines out. When her mother's new boyfriend walks into her existence, he represents both a change of direction and yet another rejection.
Review:
Arnold does little to ingratiate her leading character with us, as she tracks her self-destructive progress, Dardennes-like, around her Grays estate, tantalisingly close to leafy countryside, but trapped in a concrete and tarmac anomie of high rise flats and commuter roads. The social ills speak for themselves without need for backstory, and the tinker she befriends on the neighbouring wasteland is equally rootless but seems to hold out some hope of nurture. In the meantime, she must negotiate the Scylla and Charybdis of her mother's charismatic boyfriend and the hopeless ambition of a dancing career which seems all too inevitably a path to further exploitation by men. The film is in a sense beyond criticism: it does what it does very well, both in its ontological central performance and in its épater les bourgeois feast of shocking incident; it screams out loud its indictment of a failed society for all to hear, at the risk of alienating those who need to hear it most, and it does just a little outstay its welcome. Is the final shot of a child's helium balloon drifting free of the estate, whether an emblem of escape or of lost innocence, a misplaced venture into the world of Lamorisse?