Cannes. "Fish Tank"

By David Hudson on 05/14/2009

[Updated through 5/16]

"British filmmaker Andrea Arnold has stormed the gates of the film world with her first few works," writes Time Out London's Dave Calhoun. "Her short film 'Wasp' won an Oscar in 2005, her first feature 'Red Road' screened in competition at Cannes in 2006 and won a Jury Prize, now her second feature, 'Fish Tank' is also screening in competition. It's hugely satisfying to report that 'Fish Tank' shows Arnold going from strength to strength, offering new depths of filmmaking while at the same time building on a view of the world and a way of telling stories that are distinctly her own. She also coaxes a performance of extraordinary emotion from young British newcomer Katie Jarvis. 'Fish Tank' is another intimate portrait of a female character living on the margins of a city."

"Andrea Arnold confidently navigates the pitfalls of the 'difficult' second feature with 'Fish Tank,' which confirms her status as a torchbearer for the social realist traditions of Ken Loach and the Dardenne brothers." Allan Hunter for Screen: "The heartbreaking tale of a teenage misfit has a grim inevitability to the plotting which is offset by Arnold's talent for multi-layered characters and naturalistic dialogue and her eye for finding the poetic moments in even the bleakest of lives."

"Wiry 15-year-old Mia Williams (non-pro thesp Katie Jarvis, mesmerizing) has been kicked out of school for unexplained reasons," writes Leslie Felperin in Variety. "She now spends her days drinking when she can get her hands on booze and dancing to hip-hop tunes in an abandoned apartment - just upstairs from the digs she shares with her young mother Joanne (Kierston Wareing, from Ken Loach's 'It's a Free World') and little sister Tyler (Rebecca Griffiths, also non-pro) both of whom Mia bickers with constantly. When Joanne brings home her new b.f., hunky security guard Connor (the suddenly ubiquitous Michael Fassbender, 'Hunger'), the attraction between him and Mia is immediately palpable, despite Mia's initially hostile attitude.... [O]nly Catherine Hardwicke's 'Thirteen' and a handful of other films have dared to evoke so frankly the nature of teenage femme sexuality, as young women test their power with a mixture of precocity and naivete."

"'We were looking for a real girl,' Arnold said this morning in Cannes." IndieWIRE's Eugene Hernandez: "Well, in Katie Jarvis they certainly found one. Jarvis's bio reads simply: 'Katie makes her acting debut in 'Fish Tank.' Starring as Mia in every scene in 'Fish Tank,' Katie Jarvis is the first major acting discovery of the 2009 Cannes Film Festival."

Cannes has video and audio from the press conference.

Updates: "One of three British movies in competition at Cannes this year, 'Fish Tank' is a powerfully acted drama, beautifully photographed by cinematographer Robbie Ryan, who intersperses bleak interiors with sudden, gasp-inducing landscapes like something by Turner," writes Peter Bradshaw. "Arnold takes elements of tough social-realist drama which are, if not cliches exactly, then certainly familiar - but makes them live again and steers the movie away from miserabilism, driven by a heartfelt central performance."

Also in the Guardian, Charlotte Higgins has plenty of notes from the press conference - particularly with regard to Katie Jarvis.

For the Hollywood Reporter, Ray Bennett gives us a 43-second video review and writes, "Only one episode of revenge late in the second half stretches plausibility, but it does not detract from the film's impressive power."

And another video review: the Telegraph's David Gritten is also up on the film, talking for over a minute and a half, much of that over a clip.

"Like too many poor people in too many movies (a lot of them English) poverty is more a spiritual and psychological condition than a financial one," blogs the Boston Globe's Wesley Morris. "Mia's life is joyless. And the narcoticized drudgery the film perpetuates is too, too much: Drugs, drink, sex, pop songs (hip-hop and R&B), all balms against poverty's apparent cancer of the psyche. But one of Arnold's final images did manage to move me - a goodbye dance between mother and daughter in their living room set to a Nas's 'Life's a Bitch.' The song does all of Arnold's talking for her and more forcefully. But the filmmaker's trouble with articulating any fresh ideas extends poignantly to her characters, who don't touch or talk as they dance their pas-de-trois and Nas's lyrics explain the pain away."

"I'm just having trouble comprehending the fuss being made in other quarters," writes Mike D'Angelo at the AV Club, "because this film is awfully familiar - basically just a contemporary gloss on the classic British kitchen sink/angry young (wo)man drama, albeit with a welcome and occasionally piercing emphasis on adolescent female sexuality."

Update, 5/15: "What I'm starting to love about Arnold, whose feature debut 'Red Road' knocked everyone out here in 2006, is that her preferred settings - England at its post-industrial, council-flat bleakest - don't determine her attitude," writes Tom Carson for GQ. "Everybody's prospects are dim, but she doesn't tell cut-and-dried stories about impoverished lives. Her movies are about inwardly rich ones thwarted by circumstance."

Update, 5/16: Fabien Lemercier talks with Arnold for Cineuropa.

Coverage of the coverage: Cannes 2009.

[Photo: "Fish Tank," BBC Films, 2009]

Tags: Andrea Arnold, British Cinema, Cannes 2009, Katie Jarvis, Michael Fassbender