Fish Tank

Fish Tank, a 2009 film by Andrea Arnold, has a familiar template. The misunderstood teen, which goes back to at least Francois Truffaut's Antoine Doinel and surely farther back, is on furious display here. We meet 15-year-old Mia (Katie Jarvis), and in the first few minutes of the film she gets in a fight with some other girls (head-butting one into a broken nose), swills booze from a liter bottle, and gets in a profanity-laced argument with her mother (Kierston Waering).

I was resistant to the film at first, finding that it was loading things too heavily. Waering is a monstrous mother who has almost no sympathetic qualities, and when Jarvis spots a horse and tries to free it I felt hit over the head by the metaphor. But eventually I started to like both Mia and the film.

The central plot point of the film is the relationship between Mia and her mother's latest boyfriend (Michael Fassbender), who tries to befriend Jarvis and her younger sister. He takes them on an outing and lends his videocamera to Jarvis for use in a dance audition. As viewers we can see where this all going, but the film still takes an interesting time in getting there. Following the inevitable seduction, Jarvis finds something out about Fassbender and takes revenge, in a scene that is both fraught with peril and melodrama. I wasn't sure to what extremes Arnold would take her protagonist, and the result was pretty searing.

Jarvis is a nonprofessional who was discovered arguing with her boyfriend at a train station. She's in every scene, often followed by a tracking camera as she's in motion, almost trying to run out of the frame. It's a gutsy, emotionally raw performance. I have no idea if Jarvis has any future in the profession (to date it's her only film), but she's mesmerizing.

Fassbender, an actor on the rise (I predict he'll be Oscar-nominated within a year or two) has a tough role and pulls it off with aplomb. He has to be both likable and slimy, and is both in spades.

The film is set in Essex, which seems to be a part of England that no tourists go to. Jarvis lives in a kind of lower-middle-class squalor that is familiar to films of this miserabilist bent. There's an unnerving scene of the younger sister smoking and drinking, and the complete lack of parental attention that Waering gives her children is gut-wrenching.

A big part of the film is its music. Jarvis and her friends are all into hip-hop, and she likes to go into an abandoned apartment where she practices her moves, complete with urban shrugs. Two songs resonate: Bobby Womack's cover version of "California Dreamin'," which links Jarvis and Fassbender, and then the Nas' "Life's a Bitch and Then You Die," which calls out over the closing credits like a cry for help.