Fish in the Toilet of Love

Look out for spoilers! (Also, title is nothing but a reference to the brilliant British show Coupling, however I think it is apt for this post).

Well, after seeing Jane Eyre, spring break turned into a Fassbender fest for me, and I watched everything I could get my hands on with him in it that I hadn’t already seen. While watched last year’s Fish Tank, I was struck by its similarities to 2009’s An Education. Similarities abound--disaffected youth, instability of a family unit, affair with an older, married man. It was quite surprising how similar they are in ways. However, Fish Tank is a far superior film, and far less pretentious about being so.


Carey Mulligan was called the next Audrey Hepburn by someone after her role in An Education, and she is quite stunning in the movie. The film is well written, well acted and keeps you involved. It takes place in 1960s England, and takes great care to let you know how cool it is (she likes French New Wave cinema, and all the ‘cool’ trappings that go with that supposedly ‘anti-bourgeois’ art crowd. However, of course, An Education itself is not concerned with questions of class or race at all. Some mention of financial hardship is present (oh dear, how shall we ever afford Oxford?), however the characters lead a comfortable lives. Peter Sarsgaard is wealthier than her family, but the differences are not that pronounced, except that he can afford to take her on a trip to Paris. At the end, I couldn’t help rolling my eyes a bit as the main character says how she looks like everyone at Oxford, yet is so different on the inside. Okay, I get it, she was affected by this older man she slept with and her youthful dreams of a perfect marriage were forever shattered. However, she was able to pick herself up by her shoelaces and get back her scholarship to freaking Oxford. Boo hoo.


Fish Tank tells the story of Mia, a 15 year old girl who lives with her incredibly young mother and little sister--all of whom appear to hate each other, and are constantly yelling and cussing each other out. They are incredibly poor (“those track suits cost 20 quid”), and Mia is about to get sent to a referral school because her behavior is so out of control. Mia’s mother brings home a new boyfriend, Connor (Fassbender!), and from the start, a great amount of sexual tension dances between them. The film is wonderfully shot and has an incredible soundtrack that amps this all up, until the inevitable happens. The difference, and more believable/miserable reality of this film is that Mia has nowhere to go; it exposes the fallacy of class mobility (sure, it happens once in a blue moon I suppose, but not nearly so much as we would like to think). She tries to get ahead through the one thing she loves, dancing, however her opportunity here too turns out to be a cruel joke by the universe. Similarly, the class struggle of the film is heightened by the fact that Connor(spoiler) really belongs to the middle class, even though you don’t know this for most of the film and read him as part of the working class, like them. There are uncomfortable connotations of his “slumming” with Mia’s family, and her reactions to this knowledge are uncontrollable and frightening. While not a film about race and class, the racial aspect of class is not ignored such as it kind of is in An Education, and presents itself through Mia’s choice of music and dance styles, which have linked black and working class populations in Britain for decades (see Dick Hebdige’s work on subcultures for greater analysis of this). While the end of the film does resolve her struggles with her mother and sister, and she escapes the building she’s in, she doesn’t get to escape to one of the world’s finest educational institutions, but to Wales. Her’s isn’t a vertical track, it’s horizontal. You can’t help getting the feeling too, that her sister will end up trapped just like she is in the end.


Katie Jarvis is absolutely wonderful as the prickly, aggressive and defensive Mia, who is angry at the world that ignores and doesn’t care about her. Michael Fassbender is wonderful as Connor, who doesn’t seem so bad, is wildly charismatic, but turns out to be scum. While I enjoyed An Education, Fish Tank is unquestionably the better and more meaningful film, that feels like it’s about actual people, vs. that film that you know you’re supposed to like, but it can’t quite escape the feeling of staged-ness, or the feeling that it really should be a book (which it is).