"Fish Tank" and The Limits of the Social Drama

I'm going to start writing short criticism pieces on new-ish movies. As I've said before, I reluctantly don't go to the theatre very often. What with the cost of a ticket and the lack of compelling-looking movies, it just rarely seems worth it. So these reviews will be about interesting movies that have come out in the past 5 years or so, more or less. My aim is to take the power back from the shitty box office kings and transfer it to whatever better movies are being made with heart and soul but slip by under some of our radars. Okay, lets start.



FISH TANK



the second effort of British director Andrea Arnold is indicative of that burgeoning quasi-genre, the social realist drama. When we watch a film made in this vein we're usually following a cast of lower class characters as they interact within an isolated, bleak, and emotionally detached community. To convey this as a cinematic experience, the social drama tends to employ naturalistic, sparse dialogue and a conservative hand held camera style that stays close enough to show emotion but detached enough to never offer even a hint of interior life. The reason for this is simple: as prisoners to their environment (the economic, the physical), these characters are withheld the luxury of exploring their inner world and rendered incapable of dreaming or metaphysical desire. And this is my problem with the genre: by sacrificing style and experimentation for a strict focus of exteriors, it neglects the interior curiosities of both character and audience, and thus becomes victim to the same physical prison its trapped its characters in.

The social drama is also an inherently controversially genre because it keeps itself entirely in a world of economic poverty and lower class interaction. There's nothing wrong with that in itself, and in fact, it is urgent that places of marginalized, compromised and exploited conditions be given cinematic presence. Political films are needed now more than ever. But the social drama doesn't confront the controversy it sparks, it only tells a story about the surfaces of things and then slinks out of the theatre begging for a champion analysis from its nervous middle class art-house audience. One would hope the filmmakers of such strict genre pieces would have the gumption to reference this disease inherent in their movies by providing us with something, anything to call attention to the complex relationship between moviegoer and movie. I'm dying even for the most subtle stylistic touch or experimentation, like, you know, something cinematic perhaps?

Fish Tank (2009) is concerned with a world of poverty but it is anything but a sentimental or preachy film. On the contrary, it is masterfully ambiguous in its judgement of the outside world, which is represented only through representations of culture themselves: music, in cars or CD headphones, a television that shows music videos and programs about expensive houses. The one thing in the world that seems to bond these isolated characters is dancing. And yet they need the outside world even for this. Songs give them music and hip hop videos on the Tube give them a technique to copy. They look to t.v. and CDs as portals to a better world, and find common bonds with each other as they do it.

Its an exercise in both patience and stability to watch Fish Tank. It portrays a gut-wrenchingly unloving place where even the act of communication and the very meaning of words spoken between characters has malfunctioned. In a rare tender scene, two sisters depart from each other, the future entirely unknown, with a heartfelt "I hate you"--"I hate you, too" hug and kiss exchange. Love is forbidden: to express it, one must say the opposite. This and with the constant breach of property boundaries--personal, private, emotional--makes for truly raw cinema, both in content and style.

Fish Tank may be a "social realist drama," but it does so much more than that. Oh boy, does it ever.
As a confessed social drama skeptic, I had to convince myself over my preconceptions, but once I opened up to the film's world, I saw Fish Tank for what is truly is: a film indicative of the experience, maturity, mastery and daring confidence of its director. Andrea Arnold has only one other movie to her name, 2006's Red Road, but she has one due out later this year, and I'm excited and curious to see what kind of bleak and damaged world she'll be showing us this time. I just hope she loosens up a bit.