Firstly, even when the Cannes jury gets it wrong it generally does so for reasons that are quite interesting. For example, when the 2004 Jury chaired by Quentin Tarantino looked past such fantastic films as Olivier Assayas’s Clean, Wong Kar-Wai’s 2046, Lucrecia Martel’s La Nina Santa, Paolo Sorrentino’s Le Conseguenze dell’Amore, Park Chan-wook’s Oldboy and Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Sud Pralad in order to award the Palme to Michael Moore’s baggy, manipulative and self-indulgent political documentary Fahrenheit 9/11, people generally saw it as an entirely justifiable decision to channel the media interest generated by Cannes into an assault on the Bush regime and its dubious foreign policy.

Secondly, despite the medium of film being grotesquely over-represented in mainstream media, Cannes is really the only time when entertainment reporters focus their attentions solely on the world of art house film. Only too aware that this might be the only chance they get to push these films at a mainstream audience, film critics generally choose to downplay controversy and negativity in favour of celebrating the positive and so raising the mainstream profile of art house film.

Thirdly, unlike most awards that are given out retroactively to works released within a particular timeframe, the Palme d’Or is only awarded to films that are officially in competition at Cannes. What makes the competition so peculiar is that many of the films that are in competition at Cannes also premier at Cannes meaning that unless you happen to be in Cannes during the festival, chances are that you will not get to see any of the competing films until they are picked up for distribution. This quirk of administration means that anyone not at Cannes is effectively excluded from the conversation. Furthermore, the Cannes film festival only lasts about ten days meaning that most critics struggle to see all of the films in competition. Taken together, these two sets of considerations ensure that, come the end of the Cannes festival and the announcement of the Palme d’Or winner, almost nobody in the world has seen enough of the shortlist to be able to criticise the jury’s selection in any meaningful way.

These three barriers to criticism effectively ensure that all press coverage devoted to the Palme d’Or is either a series of uplifting platitudes about the wonders of art house film or objective and dispassionate reportage that a group of people watched a group of films and determined one film in particular to be better than the others. By and large, this media love-in works quite well as the increased visibility generated by Cannes and the Palme d’Or not only creates an international market for decidedly non-commercial films, it also provides producers with an opportunity to find people to distribute their films and thereby satisfy said international market. Unfortunately, it is precisely because Cannes plays this key role in determining which films achieve wider cinematic distribution that its selections must be scrutinised and its juries held to account.

Let us consider the films that were in competition this year:

• Moonrise Kingdom by Wes Anderson
• Rust and Bone by Jacques Audiard
• Holy Motors by Leos Carax
• Cosmopolis by David Cronenberg
• The Paperboy by Lee Daniels
• Killing Them Softly by Andrew Dominik
• Reality by Matteo Garrone
• Love by Michael Haneke
• Lawless by John Hillcoat
• In Another Country by Hong Sang-soo
• The Taste of Money by Im Sang Soo
• Like Someone in Love by Abbas Kiarostami
• The Angels’ Share by Ken Loach
• In the Fog by Sergei Loznitsa
• Beyond the Hills by Cristian Mungiu
• After the Battle by Yousri Nasrallah
• Mud by Jeff Nichols
• You Ain’t Seen Nothing Yet by Alain Resnais
• Post Tenebras Lux by Carlos Reygadas
• On the Road by Walter Salles
• Paradise: Love by Ulrich Seidi
• The Hunt by Thomas Vinterberg

The first thing that strikes me about this list of films is the sheer number of familiar names. Haneke eventually won for Love but he also won the Palme d’Or three years ago with The White Ribbon and has been a pillar of the art house filmmaking community since the early 1990s.  Similarly, Kiarostami, Loach, Anderson, Audiard, Resnais and Cronenberg are all familiar faces while Nichols, Salles, Garrone, Dominik, Reygadas, Daniels, Hillcoat, Hong, Im, Loznitsa, Mungiu and Vinterberg are all established filmmakers with varying degrees of mainstream success.

The second thing that strikes me about this list is that the average age of its directors is somewhere around the 55 mark.

The third (and most important) thing that strikes me about this list is that it is entirely composed of male filmmakers.

While I do not doubt for even a second that all of these films are entirely deserving of their places in the competition, I am concerned that the PR boost provided by this year’s Palme d’Or competition seems to have been reserved for a group of men who are already established names and whose films would most likely have been picked up for distribution regardless of whether or not they competed at Cannes. Indeed, there is simply no way that a Wes Anderson, Abbas Kiarostami or Michael Haneke film would somehow fall through the cracks and wind up creeping out as a low-key DVD release. The cinematic marketplace may be broken… but it ain’t that broken.

When a group of French feminists wrote a manifesto criticising the all-male shortlist and created a petition demanding greater transparency and inclusivity the board of directors promptly brushed the accusations aside:

The Festival de Cannes — in order to maintain its position and remain true to its beliefs rooted in universal rights — will continue to programme the best films from around the world ‘without distinction as to race, colour, sex, language, religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin, property, birth or other status’

The board then went on to quote from the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights to support its supposed anti-discrimination policy. When this exercise in abject pomposity failed to convince anyone at all, the Cannes establishment wheeled out one of the younger and more female members of its jury, the supremely talented British director Andrea Arnold whose Fishtank and Wuthering Heights I very much enjoyed. In response to the charge of sexism, Arnold explained that:

“I would absolutely hate it if my film was selected because I was a woman (…) I would only want my film to be selected for the right reasons and not out of charity because I’m female.”

She then went on to add

“I would say it’s true the world over in the world of film. There’s just not that many film directors. I guess Cannes is a small pocket that represents how it is out in the world (…) That’s a great disappointment, because obviously women are half of the population and have voices and things to say about life and the world that probably would be good for us all to hear.”

In other words, Cannes’s failure to acknowledge the existence of talented female directors is due to the fact that male directors vastly outnumber their female counterparts. Though certainly true, this is no way invalidates the charge of sexism as choosing to perpetuate historical inequalities rather than confronting them makes you a willing party to the process of discrimination that caused those historical inequalities in the first place. The only time a woman has won the Cannes top prize in its seventy three-year history was when Jane Campion won the Palme d’Or for The Piano in 1993. Similarly shocking is the fact that 2011 marked a high tide in the participation of female directors when women directed only four out of the twenty films in competition. As La Barbe put it:

Men are fond of depth in women, so long as that depth applies solely to their cleavage.

Clearly, this shit is intolerable.

Aside from the obvious moral arguments about inclusivity and discrimination, there is also an important aesthetic argument to be made about the importance of unfamiliarity to the art house cinematic experience. Indeed, chief among the many pleasures of art house film is its ability to introduce us to whole new ways of seeing the world. For example, when Apichatpong Weerasethakul won in 2010 for Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives, he was not only being rewarded for his cinematography and storytelling but also for his great skill at articulating what it must be like to see the world through his eyes, the eyes of a forty year-old gay man from Thailand. Similarly, when Cristian Mungiu won the Plame d’Or for 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days he was not only being rewarded for the skill with which he explored the issue of abortion, but also for his capacity to speak for an entire generation of Romanians who grew up under the rule of Nicolae Ceauşescu. Central to the appeal of art house cinema is its peerless ability to show us the world from an entirely different perspective. Indeed, it is telling that the success of both Weerasthakul and Mungiu lead directly to explosions of critical interest in films from their respective countries.  Art house cinema is all about new perspectives and art house cinema audiences are forever crying out for new ways of seeing the world.

By choosing only established male directors for competition, 2012 Cannes festival organisers ensured that their Palme d’Or would introduce no new conceptual blood into the cinematic bloodstream.

By choosing a shortlist dominated by elderly men, Cannes festival organisers denied art house cinema audiences the chance to discover something genuinely new.

By choosing to give the award to one of the greatest and most widely celebrated European film makers, the Palme d’Or jury ensured that art house cinemas will be devoting themselves yet again to exploring Michael Haneke’s vision of the world.

By choosing an all-male shortlist overwhelmingly dominated by old-age pensioners, Cannes festival organisers ensured that the films that set this year’s critical agenda will be those made by the people who already have all the power, all the influence, all the social capital and all the prestige.

By choosing to perpetuate art house cinema’s historic inequalities, Cannes festival organisers missed an opportunity to reach out to younger, non-male filmgoers and convince them that art house film can speak to them and their problems.

By choosing a shortlist dominated by familiar male faces, Cannes festival organisers made it clear that the art house establishment is happier celebrating old heroes than it is making new ones.

Given film’s singular capacity for challenging traditional ways of seeing the world, such conservatism and lack of ambition are deeply sad and deeply worrying for the future of art house film.

While there is no denying that Arnold’s adaptation of Emile Bronte’s Wuthering Heights (1847) constitutes something of a departure for the director, the film’s novelty lies not in its period setting but in the refusal of its characters to back down when confronted by a world they do not really understand. Arnold’s Wuthering Heights is a film in which madness and obsession confront reality and reality loses.

Arnold strips Wuthering Heights of its Victorian grandeur by presenting the house itself as little more than a large barn on the Yorkshire moors. While the farm may once have been profitable, it now struggles to sustain the Earnshaw family and their small cadre of servants. To speak of ‘servants’ is to conjure up images of class division but life at Wuthering Heights is so difficult and impoverished that there really is no difference between the life of a servant and that of a master. At the end of the day, everyone huddles for warmth around the same fire. Though admirable in many ways, the classlessness of life at Wuthering Heights proves problematic when Earnshaw returns home from Liverpool with a mixed-race foundling he names Heathcliff (Solomon Glave).

Seemingly aware that the gap separating his family from their servants is now pretty much non-existent, Earnshaw treats Heathcliff as an adopted son and full member of the family. Raised to expect more respect than his foundling status might otherwise accord him, Heathcliff proves to be a divisive presence in the house as Earnshaw’s daughter Catherine (Shannon Beer) comes to adore him while Earnshaw’s son Hindley (Lee Shaw) comes to loathe and despise him.

Though very much at the centre of both the novel and the film, Heathcliff is a character who is notoriously difficult to pin down. Capable of both extreme behaviour and radical reinvention, Heathcliff comes across as either a cruel, vindictive and jealous psychopath or as a Byronic hero doomed by the intense power of his own emotions. By giving him very little dialogue and steadfastly refusing to grant us much insight into his feelings and motivations, Arnold makes a difficult character all but impenetrable. Indeed, watching Arnold’s adaptation of Wuthering Heights I was struck by the fact that both hateful Hindley and adoring Cathy see exactly the same thing when they look at Heathcliff, it is just that they react differently to what it is that they see. In fact, one could even go a bit further and suggest that the elusive nature of the Heathcliff character comes from the fact that he is nothing but a mirror for the hopes and desires of other people.

The malleable nature of Heathcliff becomes obvious when Earnshaw dies and Hindley takes over the farm. Fully intent upon getting revenge upon the interloper, Hindley effectively reduces him to the status of a servant.  In the novel, this reduction in status is a big deal as it effectively removes Heathcliff from the bosom of his family and places him in the grip of Joseph, the demented Christian who runs the farm. However, in the film, the difference between the two states is largely one of labelling until Cathy is injured.

The absurd and arbitrary nature of this labelling system becomes painfully obvious when Cathy is mauled by a dog and forced to stay with the nearby Linton family.  Hailing from the south and possessing substantial moneys, the Lintons maintain a very clear line of demarcation between their family and their servants. Indeed, one of the reasons why the Lintons offer to look after the injured Cathy is because they feel guilty about injuring a fellow member of the landowning class. Heathcliff may well be Cathy’s social equal but his suggestion that the Lintons should “Fook off, you cunts” identifies him as nothing more than an unruly servant. Heathcliff’s ejection from the farm is downplayed by the novel but Arnold realises its importance: Suddenly class is more than just a label. Sequestered with the Lintons during her convalescence, Cathy internalises their social values to the extent that she becomes a traditional Victorian lady complete with impractical clothes and the knowledge that she needs to marry and marry well.

When Cathy returns home, Heathcliff is horrified at what she has become. Once Cathy was a child of nature much like him but now she is nothing more than a stuck up little girl playing at being sophisticated and rich. Rather than protecting Heathcliff from Hindley and helping him to regain his fraternal status, Cathy’s tacit acceptance of the Linton worldview forces Heathcliff further into the mire. When he overhears Cathy bemoaning the fact that marrying him would be demeaning, Heathcliff grabs his stuff and leaves the farm only to return a number of years later as a wealthy and successful man (played by James Howson).

When Heathcliff returns, he finds Wuthering Heights even more debased than when he left it. Having lost his wife, Hindley took to drinking and gambling to the point where he now seems like little more than a local drunkard surviving on hand outs from his former servants. His eldest son, once a beautiful blonde angel, is now a foul-mouthed runt prone to torturing animals and swearing at passers by. That such a feral child could come from a land-owning family only further confirms the toxic nature of Cathy’s classist delusions.

Cathy’s deluded nature is laid bare when Heathcliff decides to confront her.  Now married to the eldest Linton, Cathy is a lady right down to her ringlets and affected accent. However, while Cathy has fully committed to life as a member of the gentry, she remains completely unsatisfied prompting her to spend so much time with Heathcliff that that her husband is soon forced to issue an ultimatum: It’s him or me. Sensing an opportunity for revenge, Heathcliff reacts to news of the ultimatum by seducing Linton’s sister thereby ensuring that, while he will always be around and ‘part of the family’, Cathy will never be able to have him. Confronted both by the object of her desire and the knowledge that she will never be able to have him, Cathy refuses to accept her situation and drives herself into a frenzy that ultimately ends her life. Faced by the corpse of his love, Heathcliff paws at the body with the glee of a necrophiliac. Incapable of accepting what it is that he has done and unwilling to let go of his desire, Heathcliff descends into his own form of madness, a madness that refuses to accept the truculence of reality.

While Arnold keeps her Heathcliff at arm’s length, her Cathy is comparatively easy to read.  For Arnold, Cathy is a figure akin to Flaubert’s Emma Bovary; a naïve and simple-minded fool whose refusal to relinquish childish fantasies leads to a life dominated by self-destructive disappointment. By drawing a veil over Heathcliff’s inner state, Arnold raises the possibility that Heathcliff is nothing more than a physical manifestation of Cathy’s unquenchable desires: As a child, he is a friend to a friendless little girl. As a teenager, he is a potential lover for a curious young woman.  As an adult he is the handsome and wealthy stranger who offers to take her away from a life of moneyed boredom and sexual frustration. When Cathy dies, Heathcliff is stripped of his purpose and left to roam the Earth, a creature stitched together out of a decade of misery and desire. The echo of Cathy, which appears as a ghost in the novel and a fragment of memory in the film, is a reflection of the truth about Heathcliff: He is a fading echo of another person’s desire to be something, someone and someplace else. He is frustration made flesh, a demon held together by decades of unquenchable and unreasonable desire.

Arnold’s Wuthering Heights is not an easy film to watch. Plastered with grime, stripped of dialogue and littered with Malick-style nature footage and strange performances by semi-professional actors, it is about as far as you can get from the traditional ‘heritage’ approach to adapting English literature for the screen. However, by refusing to boil Bronte’s narrative down into the confines of a simple love story or tale of social alienation, Arnold has produced a film that goes a long way towards capturing the strangeness of the source material. Indeed, many of the eccentricities of Bronte’s novel stem from the fact that she was manifestly working from a deeply idiosyncratic model of human psychology. While such terms as ‘love’, ‘obsession’ and ‘madness’ may go some way towards explaining the actions of Bronte’s characters, none of these terms fully captures what it means to be a resident of Wuthering Heights: Why does Heathcliff return? Why does he destroy Cathy rather than simply elope with her? Why does he regret his actions after committing to them so utterly? Why does he stay at Wuthering Heights after Cathy’s death? Why does Cathy frenzy herself to death? Why is everyone so demented and unreasonable?

Characters are the product of a negotiation between an author’s assumptions about how other people think and those of his audience. When an author shares their audience’s assumptions about what people think and why they do what they do then characters are smoothly engaging entities. However, when a gap emerges between the folk psychological assumptions of the author and those of the audience, the audience is forced to either decry the failure of the author’s attempts at characterisation or change the way they think about people. Books like Bronte’s Wuthering Heights are written with visions of human nature so strange and cohesive that audiences find themselves being challenged by what they read on the page. The self-destructive nature of Cathy and Heathcliff’s relationship may seem almost fantastical in its intensity but its toxicity also bears the odour of truth.

We have all been in positions when we acted without thinking or in ways that would later prompt us to marvel at our capacity for unreason. Normally, we react to such moments of madness by explaining them way as the product of ‘stress’ or emotional turmoil but one could just as easily account for them using terms such as ‘love’, ‘obsession’ and ‘alienation’. These diagnostic labels protect our conceptions of self by isolating them from the rest of our personalities… moments of madness are referred to as ‘moments of madness’ precisely because they do not fit with how we see ourselves. Characterising Cathy and Heathcliff’s romance as an ‘obsessive love affair’ rationalises that which is, by design, irrational. We diagnose and reduce the plight of Heathcliff and Cathy because we do not wish to acknowledge that their irrational actions bear the imprint of an unpalatable truth. Namely, that we are all capable of acting in a manner that is nothing short of insane.

By refusing to reduce her characters to an easily accessible series of types, Arnold has reminded us that Wuthering Heights is a novel that challenges our understanding of normal human psychology. This is a film that, much like the novel, casts us as reluctant voyeurs of the human condition. Caught on the outside looking in, we can see ourselves in the people we observe and yet we are utterly appalled and disgusted by the actions these people undertake. Of course, the things that disgust us most are the things we secretly long to do. Heathcliff and Cathy remain compelling characters because we see echoes of our madness in the minutiae of their terrible lives.

Hitchcock’s teasing analogy between the cinema audience member and the voyeur is one that has continued to inspire film-makers.  However, while Rear Window was recently remade in the shape of Disturbia (2007) – a teen thriller starring Shia LeBoeuf – it is in its more oblique descendants that we find this central analogy best explored.  Indeed, many of the films of Michael Haneke express furious moral outrage at his audience’s passivity and prurience.  In Benny’s Video (1992) he suggests that watching violent films desensitises the audience.  In Funny Games (1997) he  has his characters break the fourth wall in order to make the audience complicit in their crimes.  In Hidden (2005) and The White Ribbon (2009) he follows genre guidelines in order to build tension but pointedly denies his audience the cathartic release of an answer to their questions or an unambiguous resolution.  Haneke and, to a certain extent, Lars von Trier are animated by a deep sense of suspicion about the power of the audience.  We sit in front of our TVs or our local cinema screens and we watch moments of heart-break, happiness, death and redemption.  We vicariously experience these emotions and yet we are safe.  We have risked nothing except boredom.  What have we done to earn these emotional experiences?

Some of the more intriguing attempts to answer the question posed by Hitchcock, Haneke and von Trier are found in the works of Charlie Kaufman.  In Being John Malkovitch (1999), Kaufman presented one of his characters with the opportunity to stop being a voyeur and to actually participate in the life of the character he was surreptitiously observing.  This allows the character to experience love and career success that would have been impossible to achieve on his own but the success ultimately turns to ashes as real love eludes the character who eventually winds up trapped inside someone else experiencing the love that he craves but will never receive.  Kaufman’s directorial debut Synecdoche, New York (2008) further explores the emotional hollowness of the voyeur as the film’s central character, a stage director, attempts to adapt his life for the stage only to realise that, no matter how lavish the production and how much authorial control you have, real life is always outside of your control and always capable of messing you up.

Andrea Arnold’s debut film Red Road returns to  Hitchcock’s original set up but expands upon it not with Hitchcock’s amusement or Haneke’s anger, but rather Kaufman’s sense of sadness at the ultimate impotence voyeur.

Film Poster

Jackie (Kate Dickie) works for a CCTV company.  She spends her days sat in front of a vast bank of screens and technology, standing watch over her city and reporting any problems to the police.  From the very start, we see that this is a role that Jackie happily abuses.  Far from limiting her attentions to crimes and disturbances, Jackie passes her time by getting to know the people who live near her cameras.  She watches them as they go about their business and worries about their ailing pets.  Jackie also uses her camera to watch the drunken revellers who nip into the shadows for a quick knee-trembler on the way back from the pub.

Our first image of the control room

Plush technological comfort from which to observe the sometimes terrifying real world

What Jackie sees

This role of unseen watcher seems to suit Jackie quite nicely as her life is lived at arm’s reach.  She is having an affair with a married man but their sex is filled with euphemisms and elliptical language.  “Did you…” Jackie’s lover trails off as the camera films the couple from behind someheadrests.  Even when Jackie is lured to moments of real emotion such as weddings, she is strangely aloof.  In one brilliant scene, an old woman chides Jackie for not dancing.  Jackie protests that she is rubbish at dancing.  Minutes later we see the old lady, – osteoporosis and all – happily dancing away while Jackie looks on through a window.

Sex one step removed

The old lady...

...Lives more...

...Than Jackie

Jackie’s distance from real life is soon explained when she decides that she recognises one of the people she has been spying on.  Clyde (Tony Curran) was sent to prison for killing someone close to Jackie but now he is out and living his life.  Aware that should Clyde commit a crime he will be sent back to jail, Jackie uses her position as a CCTV operator to try and gather some dirt about Clyde.  She crawls inside his life.  She gets to know who he works for, where he lives and who he is friends with.  But it just is not enough.  Hoping to learn more, Jackie is lured out of her comfy office and into the real world.  Clyde lives on the Red Road estate and Arnold makes it appear like a terrifying place made of brutalist architecture, abandoned shops, graffiti and stray dogs.  Arnold uses her audience’s fear of these settings to ramp up the tension… Jackie is in a dangerous place, following a dangerous man.  Her attempts to find out more about Clyde’s activities come to a head when she bluffs her way into a party held at Clyde’s flat.  Arnold presents the flat as an eerie combination of strangely angled corridors and weird lighting effects but she also draws again upon the fears of her audience when she has the partygoers drunkenly sing along to an Oasis song.  For anyone who has seen footage of Football-related violence or of Britain’s late-night high streets, the scene will prove terrifying : A British male who is drunk enough to sing in public is only a few swigs away from being drunk enough to explode into violence and Jackie is at the party stalking a man who has killed before.

The colours are intense, almost too much to bear

But then something changes.

But beneath the colours and the sounds lies the real world

Clyde spies Jackie and starts to dance with her.  The pair, already tipsy, dance closer and closer and before long they are grabbing at each other hungrily.  A woman who once had the power to watch without being seen and to call the police down upon anyone she disapproves of has made two large steps into the real world.  The first step, like that of James Stewart, has placed her in danger as the observed can now strike at her.  But the second step, the one that ultimately makes this film so fascinating, sees her relating to her observed specimens as fellow humans.  Humans who can illicit in her a real emotional reaction.  The kind of reaction that she had ruthlessly excised from her aloof and controlled existence.  Horrified at the way Clyde made her feel, Jackie vomits in the lift.  Her sense of displacement at having all of her power and protection stripped away is visceral.

The Bleak and Terrifying cityscape

Compare this to Jackie's control room

At this point, the film cuts the umbilical chord that ties it to the thriller genre and it becomes a drama, examining life on a council estate with the same even-handedness as Arnold displays in her second film Fish Tank (2009).  Jackie is confronted again and again to the reality of life around her and the knowledge that the priapic but yet strangely likeable Clyde and his flatmates Stevie (Martin Compston) and April (Natalie Press) are experiencing something that Jackie has long denied herself : A real life.  Suddenly Jackie has to deal with the feelings she buried following the death of her child.  How does she feel about Clyde?  How does she feel about her husband’s parents?  Will she now allow the remains to be buried or will she continue to hoard the ashes?  Can she forgive?  Can she move on?

Goodbye

While the front half of Red Road proudly follows in the foot-steps of Rear Window, the back end of the film is reminiscent of such French tales of emotional constipation as Sautet’s A Heart In Winter (1992) and Claudel’s I’ve Loved You so Long (2008).  The combination of these two types of film is as unexpected as it is satisfying, the thriller trappings become infused with the traditional dramatic elements.  This produces a film that turns on its audience and asks it why it is sitting there watching the pre-packaged emotions of a film instead of being out in the world living.  Is the fear we share with Jackie in the party scene a fear of violence or a fear of the real world?

Because of this tendency to confuse the cause with the effect, discerning audiences have come to value ambiguity in their stories.  Ambiguity that fills a space normally reserved for boldly fraudulent declarations of how the world works.  Ferocious defences of the natural order of purely literary universes.  This deliberate ambiguity is seen as a sign of intelligence as it is a reminder that there is a universe outside of the artistic, the traditional and the conceptual.  A universe more complex and more intriguing than could ever be captured by a single piece of art.

Andrea Arnold’s Fish Tank is a film that has internalised this understanding of the nature of art.  Ostensibly a formulaic coming-of-age/loss-of-innocence story, its strength comes from a willingness to explore not only the ambiguities within the characters, but also within our perceptions of those characters.

Film Poster

Mia (Katie Jarvis) is a teenager living on a council estate.  When we first encounter her, she has just had a falling out with a friend of hers (“you know what I’m like”) and now finds herself completely alone.  Isolated from her peers and her family, Mia spends her time practising dance routines in an abandoned flat on the estate.  She dreams of being a dancer but will not dance in public.  She even attacks some girls who do practice their dance routines in front of others.  This isolation is suddenly shattered when Mia is found dancing in the kitchen by her mother’s new lover Connor (Michael Fassbender).  Connor’s effect upon the three females of the household is immediate.  He first appears stripped to the waist and rippling with muscles.  He praises Mia’s dancing and chats with her amiably.  The teenager feels uncomfortable and predictably lashes out at him, and yet she is intrigued enough to want to spend time with this new person when the family go out for a drive together.  As the days pass, Mia and Connor’s relationship improves.  He encourages her to dance, lending her his video camera so that she might apply for a job as a dancer and he even gives her money so that she can go off and get drunk with one of the local lads she flirts with.  As a result of this warmth and affection, Mia and Connor wind up having sex.  This causes Connor to leave Mia’s mother and return home.  A home he shares with a wife and child.  Upon discovering the existence of this family, Mia abducts Connor’s daughter but then returns her to her family.  An act that earns her nothing more than the back of Connor’s hand across her face.

Publicity Photo

Mia is a deeply ambiguous character. Her behaviour is mostly that of an adult : She drinks, she swears, she stays out all night.  In fact, initially, it is quite difficult to work out how old she is supposed to be.  It is not until reference is made to Mia’s schooling that we can start to guess that she might be under sixteen and it is only once Mia and Connor have sex that we know for certain that she is fifteen years old.  This ambiguity is exacerbated by the way in which the film handles the other women in Mia’s household.  Indeed, Mia’s little sister Tyler (Rebecca Griffiths) is even more foul-mouthed than Mia and she is also seen smoking and swigging from a can of cider.  Even more de-stabilising is the fact that Mia and Tyler’s mother Joanne (Kierston Wareing) is presented as being just as childish as her daughters.  She seems to think of little aside from getting drunk and dancing with her friends.  The relationship between the three females is also intensely immature, like emotionally incontinent children, they scream at each other, call each other names and ignore each other out of spite, anger or genuine grievance.  Nobody wants to be hurt and so you get your digs in first.  Attack attack attack.  In Mia’s family, nobody assumes the role of the mother and so neither of the girls assume the role of a child.  In effect, all three characters seem to be at the same level of emotional and intellectual maturity.

The ambiguity present in Mia filters through into the relationship she has with Connor.  Here, Andrea Arnold brilliantly muddies the ethical waters by establishing a relationship with an exquisitely precarious balance of power.  Initially at least, we are encouraged by three separate factors to see the relationship in a positive light :

Firstly, Connor behaves like a perfect gentleman.  He is warm and affectionate with Mia but he never flirts with her or takes advantage of her when she is in a position of weakness (such as being passed out drunk).  His actions are, if anything, paternal.

Secondly, while Connor’s behaviour is not sexualised, Mia’s is.  She spies on Connor while he is fucking her mother and then watches footage of him getting dressed with a hand laid across her groin.  She also goes out of her way to press up against Connor and parades her not-quite boyfriend in front of him almost as a challenge.  A challenge Connor picks up on during sex, asking Mia if his cock is bigger than her boyfriend’s.

Thirdly, Mia’s adult behaviour patterns and the lack of a ‘more grown-up’ character in her circle means that we are encouraged to see Mia as dysfunctional but grown up and capable of having the degree of sexual agency she has in her dealings with Connor.

These three factors combine to create an impression that Mia’s attraction to Connor is not only natural but a positive thing too.  When Mia films Connor as he is getting dressed, we see it as a playful expression of risk-free adolescent sexuality.  Because Connor is passive, we think that Mia is safe and, even if Connor were to return Mia’s feelings, it is clear that Mia is grown up enough to possess sexual agency and make these kinds of decisions for herself : She wanted it.  Not Connor.

Mia and Connor

However, the second a drunk Connor asks Mia to dance for him, a second interpretation of the relationship presents itself.  Suddenly, Connor becomes an exploitative predator.  A man who used his paternal position to seduce a fifteen year old girl.  In the wake of this realisation, all of Connor’s actions must be seen in a different light.  Did he intentionally give her money to get drunk in the hope of lowering her defences?  Did he get Mia’s mother drunk in order to get her out of the way?  When he encouraged her to dance, was he encouraging her to express herself or was he wanting her to shake her arse at him?

Mia Dancing

The relationship is ambiguous as the question of Mia’s sexual agency is itself ambiguous.  This ambiguity lies at the very heart of the film and Andrea Arnold does a wonderful job of making sure that the audience never gain enough of a foot-hold to reach the basis for clear moral judgements.  In addition to being written as being in a state of arrested emotional development, the film’s female characters are forever being cast and recast with the trappings of both adulthood and childhood.  For example, after carrying Mia to bed, Connor also carried Tyler to bed.  This seems to suggest that his desire to hold Mia was purely pragmatic and parental, not sensual.  Similarly, after Connor has seduced Mia, we are shown footage of Connor’s daughter singing.  When Connor encourages his daughter, he does so in the same way as he encouraged Mia to dance, calling into question whether his encouragement of Mia actually did have a secret agenda after all.  However, the most powerful act of recasting comes towards the end of the film when Mia abducts Connor’s daughter.

Unsure as to what to do with the girl she has kidnapped, Mia marches across some fields.  When the little girl will not walk, Mia begins to scream at her in the style of a council estate mum.  This gives us an image of Mia’s future, transforming her from vengeful child to single mother.  Her mother.  However, when Connor catches up with Mia he simply cuffs her like a misbehaving child.  Again, Mia is reduced to the status of an adolescent.

Fish Tank is a extraordinary film because, despite being a coming-of-age drama, it is actually all about the lack of clear dividing lines between adulthood and childhood.  Growing up is not a question of black and white but rather of endless shades of grey.  Perhaps there is no black or white.  Perhaps all distinctions between the different stages of life are arbitrary simplifications of a world that is too complex for simple moral and psychological judgements?  Arnold beautifully captures this ambiguity in one of the film’s final scenes as the three females dance together, perfectly in step, to the same piece of music.  Clearly, if maturity is something that is evident in a person’s actions then they are all equally mature and immature.