Fish Tank (Andrea Arnold, 2009)

A 15 year-old girl, Mia, lives in Essex with her sister and single mother in a council flat when an Irish security guard called Connor comes into their lives.

Andrea Arnold’s Fish Tank evokes the naturalism of Ken Loach’s classic Kes updated to modern day Essex. Mia, played by Katie Jarvis in her first role, is an angry out-of-control teenager excluded from school and waiting to be moved to a “special school”. The first time we see her she abuses another group of teenage girls practising a dance routine in the street, head-butting one and breaking her nose, for no real reason. But underneath all her bravado and swearing lies a scared and vulnerable child trying too hard to grow up fast.

Mia needs something to cling to in order to transcend her everyday drab surroundings. In Kes Billy Casper finds some redemption through training the kestrel. In Fish Tank Mia doesn’t find redemption although she tries to free an old horse from the gypsy encampment thinking (wrongly) that it’s being abused. Mia’s only possible escape comes from secretly practising hip-hop dancing alone in an empty flat dreaming of stardom. Her mother brings home a new boyfriend, Connor, played by Michael Fassbender who befriends her and encourages her dancing aspirations.

It’s almost hard to believe that Katie Jarvis, discovered by the casting director arguing with her boyfriend at Tilbury Town railway station, hadn’t acted before as she is truly mesmerising as Mia. Michael Fassbender is, in roles like this one and in Steve McQueen’s Hunger, steadily becoming one of the best actors of his generation.

Andrea Arnold, writing and directing, has beautifully illuminated that section of society that you don’t often see on film in anything but the most negative terms. If you took much of the output of British cinema as a barometer of the country you’d imagine it was some vast heritage site full of stately houses and vapid grasping yuppies.

The recent inner-city riots and books such as Chavs: the Demonization of the Working Class by Owen Jones have pushed the debate back again onto the front pages and the front benches of Parliament. What do we do about the generations of the disenfranchised and marginalised who have never worked for a living? Do they have rich inner lives that the middle classes are unaware of? Or do they just want to get wasted and watch reality TV? Would reading a few books help? Is the breakdown of family the real reason that a whole generation of children and young adults live their lives without hope?

A film like Fish Tank certainly forms part of this debate, though it’s not some heart-warming didactic tract about hugging a hoodie. It’s an enjoyable and sometimes heartbreaking film about a young girl trying to make sense of her world which luckily for a lot of people is a world they never have to see unless it’s in a film like this or exploding onto the evening news.