Uncompromising from the start, seventeen-year-old Katie Jarvis refused to believe that the woman asking her for her phone number at Tilbury Town railway station was a casting agent for British filmmaker Andrea Arnold’s 2009 drama, Fish Tank. Jarvis had never been in a movie, never been on a film set, never even acted in a school play. So when she was interrupted during the middle of an argument with her then-boyfriend to be asked to audition, we can imagine her response. While we don’t know exactly what Jarvis told the casting agent, if she is at all like Mia, the character she portrays, the response probably consisted of an “Essex Good Morning”: fuck off.
Unfurling over an undetermined amount of time, Fish Tank tracks the exploits of Mia Williams, the pugnacious fifteen-year old daughter of a single mother. The first half of the film lacks any kind of obvious plot. Instead, people and events filter through, their inconsistency and transience reflecting the unpredictability of Mia’s life. But then Connor (Michael Fassbender) shows up. For at least a little while, Connor affects the qualities of the ideal father figure, bringing to the Williams’s home a greater sense of structure and a masculine presence.
Though not quite a dad, Connor manages to demonstrate all the superficial aspects of fatherhood without conveying any kind of basic love for Mia or her sister. He feigns reluctance when giving her extra lunch money. He takes her out on joy rides. He cleans her cuts and tells her to be more careful. And in an extremely ominous scene, he even undresses and puts her to bed after she’s come home drunk. Connor’s performance of the role of adopted father is, finally, just that: a performance.
This much becomes clear in a climactic scene in the darkness of the Williams’s living room. Lit only by the headlights of a nearby parked car, Connor and Mia shed the roles of father and daughter to engage in a painfully foreseeable tryst. In a moment so full of repulsiveness, it’s a combination of Arnold’s careful direction and the nuanced performances from her lead actors that allows the scene to transcend being a predictable twist. On one level, Arnold demonstrates the horrendous implications of an older man preying on a younger woman. But on another, more wrenching level, Arnold depicts Mia’s conflation of the love of a father with that of a lecher—an example not so much of Mia’s ignorance, but of Connor’s perverse villainy.
Free from the frills that may have come from a larger budget film, Arnold’s art relies instead on seductive writing and a career-defining performance to convey its harrowing portrait of poverty, femininity, and youth in contemporary Essex. Arnold’s work is as sparse as it is beautiful, a testament to the artistic worth of a simple story told simply. This Friday, her latest film—and what some critics are already calling her magnum opus—will be released. American Honey promises to be, if only because of the remarkable strength of Fish Tank, a must-watch this Fall.