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Fish Tank, the follow-up to Arnold's promising debut Red Road, is not a film about Connor, however; it is a film about one of his victims and, just maybe, his first real sparring partner. Robed in sweatpants, tank-tops and a black hoodie, Mia (Katie Jarvis) is the elder of Joanne's two children and a burgeoning dancer inspired by Nas and Eric B. & Rakim. She grabs Connor's attention when he finds her provocatively mimicking the moves in a rap video; he parries by introducing her to Bobby Womack's smoldering cover of 'California Dreamin'' on a family trip out to the lake.
For Connor, Mia is a challenge and a rare catch -- as is Jarvis in an urgent, formidable debut performance. When she teases him with talk of a clueless boy who has the hots for her, he prods and laughs with devilish superiority. In the film's most visceral scene, Mia watches Connor and her mother in a particularly intense bout of lovemaking and is even more excited by the fact that Connor knows she is there. Yet, the film does not play like a battle of the sexes; partially because Connor's unyielding control of young Mia never is in question. As she performs a private dance to Womack's sultry tune for him, the culmination of his work is felt and sends a deep chill down the spine.
The world that Mia comes from often resembles an ethological study. In the projects, she judges silently before lashing out at random 'sluts'; at home, her relationship with her mother sustains itself on screaming arguments. Connor constitutes an escape from this behavior and when he abandons her, Arnold, who also wrote the film's script, does not wrap her anguish up tidily. This is a bold step forward from Red Road, which won Arnold the Jury Prize at the 2006 Cannes Film Festival (she won the same prize in 2009 for Tank). Whereas the dense emotional landscape of her curious and quiet debut was later cheapened by its ultimate reveal, Fish Tank, much like Erick Zoncka's Julia, stumbles and lingers in emotions that are complex, ugly and sometimes violent and it gives the film an uneasy-yet-kinetic rhythm.
In one of the film's early scenes, Mia finds a white horse wandering in an abandoned lot before she is accosted by the horse's 'owners.' It's an odd and heavy-handed metaphor in a film that otherwise flourishes with emotional intensity and a deceivingly simple story. What Connor knew all along and we have come to realize by the end of the film is that Mia is a wild animal that, even if chained down, would find a way to rip the rusted metal stake from that ever-present block of concrete.
Freeze frame.
