www.list.co.uk/film
DRAMA FISH TANK (15) 122min ●●●●●
‘Empty pockets never held anyone back. Only empty heads and empty hearts can do that.’ Protestant preacher, author and progenitor of the theory of positive thinking Dr Norman Vincent Peale wrote that. Despite being set on a housing estate (or ‘scheme’ as we like to say in Scotland) and despite its raw naturalistic style, Fish Tank shares the same sentiment.
Andrea Arnold’s remarkable second feature, following her Glasgow-based debut Red Road, is about Mia (Katie Jarvis), an angry and aggressive 15- year-old who wants to be a dancer. When she’s not practicing in her room in the flat she lives in with her single mum (Kierston Wareing) and her younger sister on a sprawling Essex council estate, she’s harassing local girls and gypsies. A friendship with young horse owner Kyle (Harry Treadaway) develops, but it is her mother’s new boyfriend, the confident and seemingly kind Connor (Michael Fassbender), to whom she finds herself inexplicably drawn, with disastrous results.
Soaked in the influence of Robert Besson’s 1967 bucolic ‘every girl’ drama Mouchette and Luis Buñuel’s 1950 social surrealism masterpiece Los Olvidados (set in Mexico City’s slums), Fish Tank is an all-too-rare piece of work. Arnold’s gift for ugliness and beauty in juxtaposition places her in a league of her own (among living directors, anyway) and though comparisons to the Dardenne brothers’ peculiar brand of punishing modern realism are mildly relevant, Arnold’s film actually hails from - and is a mutation of - a very British strand of cinematic verisimilitude that reaches back to earliest films of Ken Loach, Mike Leigh and Alan Clarke.
Newcomer Jarvis (see profile) is the furious, unsentimental, beating heart
of the film, but it is Fassbender who steals the show - after stellar performances in Hunger and Inglourious Basterds - as the object of Mia’s obsessions. Fish Tank is a brilliantly displaced portrait of our underclass, one that asks us not to moralise but to find beauty in the consumptive. It’s also the best British film to come out for a long time. Miss at your peril. Let’s dance. (Paul Dale) ■Selected release from Fri 11 Sep.
DRAMA THE FIRM (18) 90min ●●●●●
Writer-director Nick Love has taken a big gamble in remaking Alan Clarke’s 1989 television drama The Firm, which is widely considered to be the toughest and most insightful screen depiction of football hooligans. Wisely Love hasn’t tried to slavishly imitate Clarke’s approach and has instead fashioned a mid-1980s coming-of-age tale, in which the central character is not the firm’s ‘General’ Bex (superbly played in the original by Gary Oldman), but an East End council estate teenager, Dom (Calum McNab), who’s seduced by Bex’s charisma and lifestyle.
Dom’s everyday life is routine: a bit of breakdancing with his mates, smoking cannabis and helping out his roofer father at work. The estate agent Bex (Paul Anderson) and his crew on the other hand, dressed in the latest European sportswear labels and flashing plenty of cash, offer Dom a glamourous, exciting alternative. The problem is that, while the new recruit enjoys the buzz of travelling with the West Ham mob to confrontations with rival firms, he’s not someone who relishes violence. And Bex is a leader who expects every man to stand up and be counted, especially when it comes to taking revenge on Millwall’s Yeti (Daniel Mays).
The digitally shot The Firm is an
unashamed celebration of mainstream soccer casual culture: hence the primary-coloured tracksuits and trainers, the soul/jazz funk soundtrack and the camaraderie and bravado engendered by away-day trips. No football matches are actually attended, the fight scenes are chaotic and mostly broken up by the police, and American viewers will be puzzled by
Reviews Film
the lingo of ‘lagging’, ‘melts’, ‘dry lunches’ and ‘diddicots’. It’s Love’s most enjoyable film since his underrated debut Goodbye Charlie Bright. (Tom Dawson) ■ General release from Fri 18 Sep. COMEDY/DRAMA AWAY WE GO (15) 97min ●●●●●
After Revolutionary Road, director Sam Mendes takes a turn for the worse with this naff impersonation of an independent American comedy road movie written by publisher and memoirist Dave Eggers and his Mrs (Vendela Vida). Expectant parents Burt (John
Krasinski) and Verona (Maya Rudolph) discover that the child’s paternal grandparents (Jeff Daniels and Catherine O’Hara) are moving away to Europe. So rather than stay in the rural town where they don’t know anyone, they begin visiting friends and family across America and Canada to try and find the perfect place to start their soon-to-be family.
With broadly comic cameos from Allison Janney and Maggie Gyllenhaal, slight humour and excruciating benign-yet-progressive sentiments, Away We Go is a film you will either love or hate. It takes a circuitous route to point out that the undereducated and overeducated of America and Canada are as deserving of contempt as each other and that sometimes it’s better to withdraw from the world into the privilege of the familial. It’s nauseating, superior and pat. The leads do, however, try hard to transcend the material and cinematographer Ellen Kuras gives a sly but ultimately vivid interpretation of the seeker-road genre, adding kudos to a project that probably does not deserve it. (Paul Dale) ■ General release from Fri 18 Sep.
DOCUMENTARY THE SEPTEMBER ISSUE (12A) 89min ●●●●●
RJ Cutler, political documentary filmmaker and self confessed fashion- ignoramus, is an unlikely candidate to be granted access to the hallowed halls of Vogue magazine. Yet in 2007, he received an invitation from the ‘high priestess’ of fashion herself, Anna Wintour, to chronicle the creation of Vogue’s September issue, the largest in its history. The result is brilliant and, of course, highly political. It is a film about a multi-billion dollar business, created and driven by two highly individual and discerning women. It’s also about the mad discrepancy between fantasy and reality, which is to say it is a film about fashion as an art form.
Whether Cutler manages to crack Wintour’s infamous icy veneer is debatable
as she does so little to dispel ‘the myth’ herself. Ultimately, she’s not the real star of this show anyway: Vogue’s creative director of 20 years and former flame- haired fashion model from Wales, Grace Coddington is. Her steely determination to get her own way is only matched by her extraordinary vision and passion for her work and the resulting frosty rapport with Wintour makes for utterly mesmerising viewing. Cutler has made a compelling, funny and intelligent film. He has also produced
a historical document since, given the current economic climate, it’s unlikely Vogue will ever be able to produce another issue on the scale of that of September 2007 again. (Anna Rogers) ■ Selected release from Fri 11 Sep. See profile, page 50.
10–24 Sep 2009 THE LIST 49