Little women

Yesterday I saw another of the Cannes films that won a prize. It's the British Fish Tank, and again its Prix du Jury is well deserved. That portrait of a teenage girl won't be forgotten.

Mia is a rebellious British teenager whose life isn't a piece of cake. Actually it sucks a lot. You wouldn't want to live in that Essex housing estate that is her fish tank. As for her family, it sucks too, her mother (the wonderful actress that starred in Loach's Its a Free World) wouldn't get a prize in parenting, and her little sister has a filthy mouth(yes the film is filled by bad language from all the female characters but the little sister delivers a very creative coarse language and is hilarious). The three females basically keep insulting each other all the time. Mia doesn't go to school anymore and she doesn't have any friends left. The 15 year old Mia is alone, feeling awful –she hides her body beneath shapeless sportswear just like she hides her softer side–reckless and restless.

The fish tank is the metaphor of the many cages Mia wants to escape. One of the them is her own body, hence her drinking booze (something her mother must have passed on her), her practicing hip-hop dance when nobody watches, and her trying to free a white horse who's chained up by some gypsies in a wasteground. One day a man shows up in the flat and sees her; Connor a hunk whom Mia's mother has brought back. His arrival leads to new possibilies, hope and, perhaps, disappointments.When I read that Mia had a secret passion for dancing and dreamed of becoming a hip-hop dancer, I was afraid that Fish Tank might be some sort of female Billy Eliott, a politicaly correct feel-good movie that would turn into a fairy tale, but it is not. The music has a role to play but Mia's passion isn't the stuff the film is made on. Also even though the film obviously belongs to the "social realism" family like the ones by Ken Loach or Mike Leigh(the plot takes place in a dirty and hopeless neighbourhood), it has its own style. It doesn't shy away from the ugly truth but it doesn't convey a political message, doesn't make a social statement. It's definitely a woman film, not only because the lead character is a 15 year old girl or the director is a woman(Andrea Arnold), but also because it's about the birth of a woman and about female desire.

There's such a sensuality in the way the camera films everything. It makes the audience feels what Mira feels, the breath she tries to catch, the fragrants she inhales, the skin that is touched, whatever Mia smells or tastes.

Michael Fassenber, who plays Connor, is again terrific (that actor never ceases to amaze me) and he's quite perfect as the male object of desire, so nice a guy but oh so disturbing. In the first scene he appears in, you can't help feeling like Mia and staring at that half-naked body. The sexual tension between Mia and Connor is really well done, not in the usual cliched way. Not many films have been made on female desire and even fewer have been made on a teenage girl's sexual awakening (I can think of Splendor in the Grass but Nathalie Wood's character was older, I guess), on the burgeoning female sexuality. Because in this film, even though it's obvious that the attraction and feelings are mutual(Mia and Connor do like each other) to the point of their crossing the line one night(while the pastered mother has passed out), it isn't much about a forbidden love nor about a man falling for his mistress' daughter, it's about Mia becoming a woman, about her leaving the fish tank.

Of course things aren't that simple and Connor isn't the key of her freeing for he isn't as nice as she(we)'d like him to be; he is just a tool in her metamorphosis, of her moving on past her chrysalis state. What I enjoyed in the movie is the lack of over-simplification. We get to see the dirty and the beautiful, the light and the dark side of every character, their strength and weaknesses. Anyway the film always avoids the easy route.So definitely not a fairy tale but not a depressing movie either, there's tenderness still and some sort of moral code remains, even there, even then.