Mia likes to dance and, like many teenage girls growing up in British commission housing while watching Britain's Got Talent, she hopes it is her ticket out. Yet like many teenage girls, especially those whose future involves youth pregnancy or drugs, Mia isn't that good. So when her young mother gets a new boyfriend, a seemingly ok guy who gets the thumbs up from Mia's comically astute younger sister, things start looking up. For one thing, he likes her dancing.
And it's about here that you get that sinking feeling that Mia and her family are in line for a beating. However it's not the standard council misery-fest of, say, Ken Loach or the recent Harry Brown. As with her festival favoured Red Road, Arnold treats audiences to a densely layered story wrapped around a kernel of defiance and resolve. More interestingly, her superb drama opens up a woman's lot without once dissolving into a chick-flick, then even more significantly manages an uplifting resolve against all expectation. That's if time spent on a dead-end estate with foul-tongued skanks and predatory men is in anyway uplifting.
Central to this success is a blinding performance from Katie Jarvis as Mia, and the hypnotic Inglorious Basterds' Michael Fassbender as Mum's studly new squeeze. Together they propel a story overflowing with sexual energy to a shocking conclusion that makes Fish Tank one of the years finest dramas. Social realism this good simply doesn't happen very often. Small wonder it picked up a BAFTA plus the Jury Prize at Cannes which, all things considered, is not a bad result for your second film.
// COLIN FRASER
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