More Andrea Arnold: Fish Tank (2009)

MELANIE WILLIAMS

Fish Tank focuses its attention on fifteen year old Mia who lives in a flat in Essex with her mother and her younger sister. Mia is a rebellious loner whose relationship with her mother is antagonistic and mutually verbally abusive. But Mia has a secret passion: dancing, which she practices in an abandoned flat. Her mother’s charming handsome new boyfriend Connor encourages and praises her dancing and Mia is obviously drawn to him. As their relationship develops, it shifts from paternal to sexual. Connor leaves but Mia tracks him down and discovers he already has a wife and child. Mia is tempted to take a terrible vengeance but finally relents and returns home. She attends her audition but leaves without dancing, put off by the sexualised atmosphere. Offered a road trip to Cardiff with her on/off traveller boyfriend Billy, she leaves home, after a tentative but unsentimental reconciliation with her mother.

Writer-director Andrea Arnold is highly distinctive in contemporary British film culture in her yoking of a social realist aesthetic to a focus on the lives of girls and women in working-class communities. Her settings have ranged from her native Dartford for her Oscar-winning short film Wasp (2003) to Glasgow for the surveillance drama Red Road (2006) and finally to the high-rise estates of Essex for Fish Tank, but all three films are connected through their focus on female experience. Although the most obvious points of contextualisation for Arnold’s films are current work by the likes of Shane Meadows and veteran Ken Loach, there are also noticeable links with British cinema of the past. For instance, Fish Tank’s study of an awkward teenager’s sexual awakening and her antagonistic relationship with her sexually active mother echoes the exploration of a similar family dynamic nearly fifty years previously in the British New Wave milestone A Taste of Honey (1961).

Akin to the casting methods deployed by Loach and Meadows, Arnold wanted a non-professional actor for the central role in Fish Tank, someone who would not merely play the character of combative teenager Mia but understand her intimately through her own life experience. When Katie Jarvis was spotted arguing with her boyfriend at Tilbury railway station, she was hastily signed up and Jarvis exceeds all expectations of a complete newcomer to acting with a riveting debut performance which oscillates between sullen anger and heart-breaking vulnerability. Ambiguity is the keynote of Michael Fassbender’s performance as Mia's mother’s amiably sexy Irish boyfriend Connor, initially behaving towards Mia in ways that could be simultaneously interpreted as warmly avuncular or sexually loaded. Arnold, in this film as in her previous ones, evokes her heroine’s sexual desire through an aesthetic suggestive of a female gaze: examples include the close-up of Danny Dyer’s mouth from Nathalie Press’s lustful perspective in Wasp, the heroine’s tracking of her future lover via CCTV in Red Road, and Mia’s use of the video camera to record and play back a bare-chested Connor as he dresses, as well as her covert voyeuristic observation of her mother and Connor’s lovemaking in Fish Tank. However, the film also communicates sexual attraction in more sensual terms with slow-motion close-ups of Mia enjoying the physical closeness of a piggy-back ride or breathing in Connor’s freshly-spritzed aftershave when he bends over her.

Fish Tank refuses gushing sentimentality: Mia does not forge a triumphant career in dance, mother and daughter are not reconciled in a tearful embrace (a brisk smile when they spontaneously dance together in the flat is as warm as it gets) and although we empathise with her, Mia is also capable of cruelty, foregrounded in one stomach-churning sequence where we fear she may commit a terrible act of revenge. And lest we assume that Fish Tank is directly autobiographical, given Andrea Arnold’s own Thames Estuary upbringing and her early career as a dancer, the director provides an important corrective: ‘Those things have never directly happened to me. My mind goes places, I have an imagination.’

Exciting season of British women's films at BFI Southbank, London

The British Film Institute, in association with Bird's Eye View, is running a season of films by contemporary British women filmmakers including Carol Morley, Joanna Hogg, Andrea Arnold, Gillian Wearing, Lucy Walker and Clio Barnard. It's called 'Made in Britain' and it runs until the end of April. Enjoy it if you can! http://www.bfi.org.uk/whatson/bfi_southbank/film_programme/april_seasons/made_in_britain

Wuthering Heights (Andrea Arnold, 2011)

Melanie Williams

Andrea Arnold’s latest film is based on a book; you may have heard of it. Of course, when a film is an adaptation of a Great Novel that tends to dominate discussion of it, sometimes to the exclusion of all other factors. How faithful it is to the literary source, and how it tries to differentiate itself from previous famous adaptations of the same raw material become the key questions. But it’s worth pointing out that this critical territory is new for Arnold who made her name with intense, contemporary dramas based on original material such as Red Road (2006) and Fish Tank (2009) and so she is a newcomer to the world of ‘it wasn’t like that in the book’. She may not take up permanent residency there either; having stated in interviews that this is the only work of classic literature that she’s really been drawn to as a film subject. Wuthering Heights has proved an irresistible lure for more than one female creative artist – think of Kate Bush’s unique musical re-telling of Emily Bronte’s story. Arnold’s challenge was to be both true to the book and to her own vision - ‘I really wanted to honour Bronte’, she said, ‘Wuthering Heights is a strange, dark, and profound book and I wanted to honour that spirit. I made decisions that felt true to me but also true to the spirit of the book’ - a balancing act which she pulls off with impressive accomplishment.

Arnold and screenwriter Olivia Hetreed make the same editorial decision as the celebrated 1939 William Wyler film of Wuthering Heights – to chop out the material on the subsequent generations and to focus exclusively on the imagination-capturing central romance of Cathy and Heathcliff. Although this is a very rough-and-ready version; hard to imagine Olivier’s Heathcliff announcing to the gathered Lintons ‘you’re all cunts’ as James Howson’s Heathcliff does in this film. And this brings us to one of the most notable aspects of the film; its casting of two black actors, Howson and Solomon Glave, to play Heathcliff as man and boy. This choice makes explicit something which is hinted at but never said directly in Emily Bronte’s original novel: she describes the character variously as ‘dark-skinned gypsy’, a ‘Spanish castaway’, and ‘little Lascar’, indicating South Asian ethnic origin. Previously the role had always been played by white actors but usually emphasising a dark, brooding quality. But in this version, what the book might have been implying is given definite substance on the screen. In a way, it makes sense of a lot of things; the extreme social exclusion and prejudice suffered by Heathcliff (the scenes in which he is stripped and stabled like an animal in the film speak to this, as does Hindley Earnshaw’s insistence on calling him nigger) and the interdictions on a relationship between him and Cathy which are no longer just about class anxieties but the taboo of miscegenation.

At the beginning of the film we see Howson running at and slamming into a wall on which are scrawled the childish scribbles and drawings of his younger self and young Cathy. He’s trying to get back there, to smash through the border between present and past. Cathy and Heathcliff’s allegiance, poised between platonic and sexual just as the two children are poised on the cusp of adolescence, provided the only moments of solace and warmth in his otherwise harsh youth. Arnold refuses any kind of heritage prettification of the story; instead bringing to bear on it the sensibility she had honed in her previous contemporary-set films. It’s certainly a very elemental film, and you get a real sense of the cold, the damp, the rain and (especially) the wind besetting the Yorkshire landscape. The camera dwells on miraculous growth, flowers in the cracks, green shoots springing from boggy mires, nature’s persistent fecundity. It also suggests the sensuality of certain moments, as with Heathcliff’s first ride on horseback behind Cathy; the mingling of the textures of warm horsehair and Cathy’s windblown tresses, and the gentle sounds emanating from of the horse’s slow progress across the moor and its insistent quasi-sexual rocking motion, all conspire to make this a memory seared into Heathcliff’s mind for all time. Likewise the play fight in the mud which seems to mark the point when latent sexuality becomes a tangible (and dangerous) possibility.

Meanwhile, the attractions for Cathy of marrying into the wealthy Lintons are made plain by the contrast between her bare farmhouse and the elegant décor of the home she marries into, a contrast as striking as the fleshy young hoyden who grows up into a fine-boned beauty (played by Skins’ Kaya Scodelario). But this is a tragic story, not a positive tale of female social mobility. Cathy is haunted by the loss of Heathcliff and goes into terminal decline when he returns years later, a wealthy self-made man, and sadistically elopes with her sister-in-law, just to prove that he can. Cathy had admitted to her old housekeeper that Heathcliff was ‘my soul’ as they sat together in the intimacy of firelight, unaware that Heathcliff was also hidden in the room, overhearing her confession (spying from a concealed position is a recurrent Arnold motif). But the soulmates still can’t overcome the impediments to their love; they never make it back to their childhood idyll, at least not in this life. The other Bronte adaptation of 2011, Cary Fukunaga and Moira Buffini’s Jane Eyre (indications of a mini Bronte boom?), concludes on a happier note with its couple reunited. No such solace is offered in Wuthering Heights. Arnold’s film is a radical take on Emily Bronte’s novel but its bruising brutality and insistence on the primacy of the senses serves its source material very well.