Film Analysis - Fish Tank (2009)

Film Analysis:
Fish Tank (2009) - Directed by Andrea Arnold
Starring: Katie Jarvis, Michael Fassbender and Kierston Wareing

Fish Tank is a British social realism feature film based around the exploits and adventures of a 15-year-old girl named Mia Williams. The film was originally released at the Cannes Film Festival on the 14th of May, 2009 and was later released to the public on the 11th of September 2009. The film follows the exploits of Mia through her socially deprived life, living in quite a poor area of London. Her mother seems to heavily neglect her, leading her to ‘act out’ in various ways, including drinking, stealing and harassing.

Micro-features are the technical aspects of a film which allows it to create meaning and show to an audience exactly what the narrative is trying to portray. A combination of the 5 main micro-features in this film helps illustrate Arnold's view. She grew up in a similar fashion to the way Mia grew up and therefore, she tries to replicate a certain aspect of her life to show audiences what living in these conditions is really like. People who have never lived in this kind of way can only pass judgement, they don’t really know until they’ve been there or seen it for themselves. All of Arnold's films, including her short film Wasp(2003), have similar themes which show them as one in the same, being very true to the way that she lived. This film demonstrates themes of crime, neglect, passion, disrespect and obsession. Mia goes through various different stages in the film which reflect each of these themes in a certain way.

In terms of cinematography, the focus is mainly seen through a handheld camera. A convention of the social-realism genre is that the camera follows the protagonist as it’s main focus and uses many P.O.V and over-the-shoulder shots. This helps the audience feel as though they are in the world experiencing it for themselves. The cinematography is also there to create emotion, this is done through the previously mentioned shots to create a sense of empathy for the character, seeing it from their perspective allows you as the audience to discover how much a change in the characters life can affect their overall life. For example, Connor is introduced early on as Mia’s mother’s boyfriend. He serves as a sense of power in a household comprising of 3 girls. He treats them and takes care of them, acting like a father figure, however the audiences perception of him changes once he seduces Mia and turns out to have a family of his own. His performance of a single, tough, average man is flipped on it’s head after Mia discovers him to be a loving, caring father. This revelation wells up to release the pent up aggression inside Mia, ultimately leading to him abducting his daughter. This beat, a change in a characters role to help him/her pursue their goal, helps define Mia as a character. Deprived of love, she acts out after finding out that a man that she’d grown to like and appreciate is actually just scamming her and her family. This micro-feature is used in order to create a sense of progression in Mia’s character. At the beginning of the film she is quite introverted, very volatile and unable to care. Slowly after the introduction of Connor she begins to open up and change as a character.

Mise-en-scene refers to the arrangement of props, costumes and lighting in the frame of a film. This micro-feature is used to set a contextual view for the audience. With certain costume and props we as an audience are able to tell what kind of area the film is set it. Immediately from the first shot of the film we are able to tell that the film is perhaps set in a deprived area. From the way Mia is dressed to the kinds of things she does often, such as drink heavily and smoke, from a stereotypical point of view, we can tell exactly what the film will entail.

Incoming opinion >
I personally thought very little of this film. Very little about the plot enticed me since I have very little interest in the subject portrayed in the film. Mia, as the main protagonist wasn’t a very likeable character in my opinion, I never empathised with her struggle and never thought her problems would resolve. As the film progressed I felt more and more distant from her character, a scene in which she abducts a child and almost kills her acted as a deciding factor for me. Her stress and sheer lack of respect for the ones around her (and vice-versa) made me care little about her and ultimately the film. The pacing was lack lustre for me, ‘slow’ is a word I’d use to describe it, yet I use this term to describe the rate at which new plot is introduced. Early on we find out the her mother had a boyfriend, yet it seemed as though the content in between then and the middle of the film was just filler, used to build character but not in an interesting way that made me want to find out the rest of the plot. In all opinionated honesty, I didn’t like this film very much since the topic was not to my liking and if it were on TV, I would most likely skip over it.