Language!

At the behest of an ex-colleague, who was on the jury that gave Andrea Arnold the Sutherland Trophy for it, I checked out Red Road a couple of years back at... I think it was the Brisbane International Film Festival (all of the festivals blur into one a couple of years after they happen...) and I quite enjoyed it. I thought it was a very solid film, interestingly told, well made, not brilliant but a very good debut. So I was quite looking forward to her follow up, Fish Tank, which came out last year and I kept missing in cinemas (that seems to be a theme for me and movies last year - here's hoping I can get my shit together this year.)

Fish Tank was great. It really was. Mia (Katie Jarvis) is a fifteen year old living on the estates of Essex. Being an Essex girl she has a mouth like a trooper, fights like a bitch and has no respect for anyone. (I apologise for the generalisation... but that's how I've been told Essex girls are. From an Essex girl. It's not quite racism, but it's close, though it also paints a very specific picture in a very short space of time. It's a useful cliche for one in a hurry.) She lives in a little apartment in a hideous highrise so prevalent on the outskirts of London with her mother, Joanne (who must have had Mia at about the age Mia is now... she's quite young - played by Kierston Wareing) and her younger sister Tyler (Rebecca Griffiths - whose mouth is just as foul.)


Mia wants to dance. That's pretty much all she enjoys and all she wants to do. She doesn't seem to have any friends, so takes her discman and speakers to an abandoned apartment and dances a crazy fusion of whatever seems to come into her head. And then Joanne brings home her new boyfriend, Connor (Michael Fassbender - be still my beating heart) and everything changes. Mia likes him instantly, though being a fifteen year old girl she isn't about to let on, instead insulting him as much as she insults everyone. Seeming to have heard it all before, it is water off a duck's back for Connor, who laughs it off as he selectively plays dad to Mia and Tyler, taking them to bed, taking them fishing, giving them lifts. Connor is the perfect predator, knowing exactly how to cultivate the attraction (not that it would be hard when you're Michael freaking Fassbender) without scaring anyone or giving anything away. He encourages Mia to record herself dancing to send off for an audition for a club looking for female dancers, and she does.


Soon, though, everything starts to fall apart. The relationship goes a step too far and it turns out that Connor has been lying about a lot. Mia uncovers it and confronts Connor, taking something dear to him before almost destroying it and then returning it. Connor turns on her, but being a victim of a sexual predator almost twice her age who she herself actively pursued, Mia is too scared to take revenge, instead shipping out with a boy she met when she tried to set his horse free earlier in the film.

Jarvis is exceptional in her debut role. She is the perfect sulking loner teenage girl in public, but in private or when not watched is craving those all-too-adult feelings of reciprocated attraction. Hovering on the edge of adulthood, she's not quite there yet, and seems unsure as to whether she should fight for inclusion, thereby demonstrating her immaturity, or sit back and wait for her entrance pass, which means she's going to miss out on so much she wants to be a part of. She's backed up very well by Wareing as her mother, trashy and uncaring, completely unaware of what her daughter is doing, let alone feeling, and with no ability to control either of her children. Speaking of children, Griffiths is possibly most frightening as the much younger sister displaying so many of her sister's character traits, because she is so young. Why does innocence not last? And Fassbender, as the only male influence on these women, proves not to be a particularly good one, playing the creepy older man and the overwhelmingly attractive heartthrob simultaneously with perfection. I won't talk about the fact that he does a lot of it only half dressed, because that would indeed be crass.


Arnold lifts from her strong debut to give us an excellent sophomore effort, something that many struggle with, and with Robbie Ryan managed to capture the stark nature of the world these people inhabit simply and with an austere beauty. Jarvis will emerge the star, hopefully managing to parlay this introduction into a career if she can show she has the chops, but the film as a whole is very strong. 4.5 stars.

313 x Fuck.

The Brits seem to be able to consistently pull off solid realist films more than pretty much any other country. Shane Meadows does it, Andrea Arnold does it, Mike Leigh does it. But probably the longest serving member of this Brit-realist culture is Ken Loach, the master of depression. Loved by Cannes, he’s never been embraced commercially or, really, by awards-givers on the other side of the Atlantic, unlike, for example, Leigh. But for the last twenty years or so he has been putting out powerful films about the lower classes of the United Kingdom, and doing them very well. (I will note that I almost had a heart attack when I saw a poster for Looking For Eric, his latest, earlier this year with the word ‘heart-warming’ on it - what? Ken Loach? Heart-warming? Has the entire world gone mad?)

I’ve seen a few of them, but right now without an internet connection handy all I can think of is The Wind That Shakes The Barley with Cillian Murphy, a grueling but powerful look at the long-running tensions between the Irish and the English. Sweet Sixteen, his 2002 feature that I saw the other day, is set in Scotland this time (he doesn’t discriminate when it comes to which realm of the UK he sets his films in), and is a much more immediate film.

In his debut film role, Martin Compston gives a stunning turn as the fifteen-almost-sixteen year old central character Liam. Kicked out of his grandfather’s home (which he shares with his mother’s lover), he sets about exacting revenge by stealing the drugs hidden out in the kennel of this house, with a view to selling them to purchase a caravan that he and his mother can live in when she is released from prison the day before his sixteenth birthday. This small-scale, initially short-term narcotic crime endeavour quickly escalates after he steps on the turf of a major name in drugs in the town, and he is coerced into joining this drug ring. He proves quite successful, and very quickly the money is rolling in - he has his own apartment, a sharp suit, and everything is going well. He loses his relationship with his best friend, Pinball (William Ruane), but he regains a strong relationship with his sister and her young son. Plus, his mother is about to be released, and that is all he cares to look forward to. When she gets out, no more shall she take drugs, but instead will be able to enjoy the fruits of his labour, selling on to other addicts. 

The world of drugs is never really pretty, but Loach does an incredible job of not showing it as all bad. Well, he shows that Liam does, indeed, get many benefits out of it, and yes, he has to make some hard decisions, but who doesn’t have to if you want to get ahead in any industry? Just because these decisions involve knives doesn’t necessarily make them more morally objectionable. Don’t get me wrong, Loach does not glorify this gangster world. Instead, he shows it as it is. Highs and lows. Ups and downs. Winners and losers. It’s just that the stakes, both to gain and to lose, are higher, and often involve your health, your mobility, or your life.

Central to the effectiveness of the film is that stunning central portrayal by the young Compston. He is pretty much present for the entire film, and his likability despite some of the things he does is what makes the film sing, makes it work. If you weren’t on some level rooting for his success, it would all fall spectacularly to pieces. Barry Ackroyd captures the sparseness and starkness of the town without exploiting poverty, instead giving us the simple way it is. And Loach draws it all out without ever seemingly wasting a word, a shot, a moment. It is a very simple concept, but it is superbly executed. In reality, I think it elevated that world of realism by avoiding the horrible sense of despair that is so often front and centre, and by instead creating a world of hope in unexpected circumstances. Maybe I’ll have to check out Looking For Eric sooner rather than later - it looks like he just may be able to make it work. 4.5 stars.

(By the by, the title of the post is reference to the number of times 'fuck' (or its variations) is apparently said in the film. That seems like a lot. In fact, it would make it about every 20 seconds. And you know what? I didn't really notice it being used excessively. Though, there were numerous points where I couldn't actually really understand what they were saying, due to their accents...)