Fish Tank

It is, as the best cinema should be, always all about the image. Andrea Arnold's films are born, she says, with just this: a visual imprint - strong, unsettling, inexplicable. The stories then slowly unfurl in her mind from that starting point. On paper, they sound grim: the director goes for terse, no-nonsense titles, and her working-class world seems at first unforgiving.

On screen, they are thrilling, intriguing, instantly gripping, the work of a natural-born, utterly original director.

Distinctively female in perspective, there's generally a woman at their centre and a rugged piece of male rough trade hovering on the periphery. The image that triggered Wasp, Arnold's third, Oscar-winning short film, was a wasp crawling into a baby's mouth; it has a single mother abandoning her four young kids outside a pub when an old flame asks her out. The extract from Wasp posted below displays some of Arnold's hallmarks: the fast editing, the sense of intimacy and a potent erotic tension combined with gathering anxiety.



Arnold's debut feature, Red Road (2006), was set in windswept Glasgow, where a withdrawn CCTV operator sets out to seduce and destroy the man who caused the death of her family. In Fish Tank, Mia, a loud-mouthed 15-year-old fizzing with spit and vinegar (played by the electrifying newcomer Katie Jarvis), dreams of escape from her shabby housing estate through a passion for dance. And her mother's likeable, hunky new Irish boyfriend (Michael Fassbender [3]) seems at first just the man to help her along.

In an American genre movie, you would confidently infer the rest. Fassbender would be a benign father-figure and Jarvis would discover a spectacular talent and find her way out of the ghetto. There's none of that, of course. On the other hand, as a British picture, Fish Tank could have been an equally predictable slab of kitchen-sink miserabilism. Not the case either: it explodes with energy.

All Arnold's films end on a note of wary optimism. And the sheer elan of the film-making carries them along. There is a powerful sense of place, whether it is, as in Red Road, Glasgow's stark high-rise tower blocks among which foxes rove, keening, in the urban jungle; or, as in Fish Tank, the decaying beauty of the Essex countryside, with its shining swathes of water and big skies. The film's fifth-act climax is dreamlike and wholly unexpected. Don't forget to listen out, too, for the sound design and music track, for the craftsmanship of her work is always a delight.

Though still at the beginning of her career as a director (she was previously a presenter on children's television), Arnold, 48, has instantly achieved world-class status. Wasp won that Oscar in 2005 (where the director floored the Hollywood glitterati by declaring it the "dog's bollocks" in her acceptance speech). Red Road, a last-minute surprise choice alongside the heavy hitters in the Cannes competition of 2006, went home with the Jury Prize; Fish Tank took the same award there this year. Yet Arnold still remains one of Britain's best-kept secrets. Anyone who professes to keep up with the cutting edge of contemporary cinema should rush to discover it.