REVIEW: “Fish Tank” (***1/2)

Edinburgh International Film Festival

There’s a slightly condescending tendency among many critics to brand almost any British film set on a working-class council estate as “miserablist” simply by virtue of the aesthetics of its setting, despite the fact that many thousands of people live functional, three-dimensional lives in precisely such conditions.

Of course, it’s a bias that filmmakers feed too: since Ken Loach essentially patented this sub-genre with “Cathy Come Home” in 1966, the landscape of Britfilm has been clogged with imitators piling on the grimness to perverse effect.

Occasionally, however, the trend gives rise to a creative voice of genuine compassion and ingenuity. Recently, Lynne Ramsay and Shane Meadows have located poetry and humor in the crevices of blue-collar Britain.

Now Oscar-winning short filmmaker Andrea Arnold joins their rank with “Fish Tank,” a deserving Jury Prize winner at Cannes that represents a quantum leap on Arnold’s already impressive feature debut, “Red Road.”

I’d be lying if I said “Fish Tank” isn’t an often unhappy, and occasionally very angry, film. But in its detailed, immersive study of the life of an emotionally tormented, 15 year-old Essex girl (the term applied geographically rather than pejoratively, though protagonist Mia certainly has many of the vulgar physical and behavioral traits beloved of British satirists like Catherine Tate), the film seeks out moments of everyday contentment, and even cathartic bliss, that keep the proceedings in balance. (It’ll be interesting view the film in relation to its similarly-themed U.S. counterpart, “Precious.”)

That Mia employs dance as a means of escape from the maelstrom of parental neglect, peer bullying and social worker threats that plague her might sound narratively trite, but it works, in no small part because 17 year-old newcomer Katie Jarvis brings such vivid physical charge to the character.

It’s also because Arnold uses the activity as a window into the fascinating cultural limbo of British youth, who (as anyone who noted the prevalence of hip-hop dance on the recent series of “Britain’s Got Talent” can tell you) prize the Ciara beats and Juicy Couture tracksuits of their urban trans-Atlantic counterparts, but communicate in an irony-strewn language all their own. (One in which words like “fuckface” and “cuntface” are exchanged as sisterly terms of endearment.)

Appropriately, then, Arnold deploys a diverse range of musical cues to supplement her storytelling, artfully recontextualizing the disparate likes of Leona Lewis’s “Bleeding Love” and Bobby Womack’s cover of “California Dreaming” to great effect. (The latter, a particularly integral track, will likely send many a viewer straight to their iTunes accounts.)

Meanwhile, Mia’s affinity for urban American music forms the basis for her friendship with her feckless mother’s new boyfriend Connor (Michael Fassbender), a gentle Irish security guard who enters the family as a kind of ready-made Dad (Mia’s own father is never even mentioned), but who rapidly finds himself in over his head.

As the first person to take a genuine interest in Mia and her artistic gifts (“You dance like a black,” he tells her in awkwardly admiring tones), he finds himself unprepared for the mood-swinging intensity with which Mia responds, as their relationship rapidly spirals out into sexually dangerous territory, shown with a laudable frankness which I suspect may be hampering the film’s U.S. distribution possibilities.

This uneasy emotional left-turn requires deft playing to preserve its ambiguities, which happily is something “Fish Tank” has in spades. Fresh from his incendiary turn in “Hunger,” Fassbender scores again here as a man juggling several classes of secret. Tempering his folksy regional warmth with stark flashes of misplaced carnality, it’s a tricky performance that seals his standing as one of his generation’s finest.

Nonetheless, the film really belongs to Jarvis, an in-name-only amateur discovered on an Essex railways platform, but an astute and fully-formed actress (not to mention a great dancer) in her own right.

Jarvis has supreme command over Mia’s wild vacillations between child and woman, often flicking the switch within a single scene, and binds the performance with galvanizing physical grace. (The camera quite literally loves her, DP Robbie Ryan repeatedly mirroring her movements with brilliant rhythm and fluidity.) It’s plainly the debut of the year so far, and while I’m not sure where her talent will go from here, Jarvis’s recent signing by a high-profile U.S. agency suggests there’s more to come.

(Also quite the find is Rebecca Griffiths as Mia’s 8 year-old sister Tyler, combining cherubic cuteness with a merciless tongue that reels off such pithy lines as “I like you, I’ll kill you last,” with an unnerving absence of affectation that puts a million precocious Hollywood tykes to shame.)

As in “Red Road,” Arnold faintly loses her tight grip on the material in the final reel, though Mia’s upsetting, boldly unsympathetic actions are a stark dramatic development that may require another viewing to settle in. I also wish there were a little more dramatic shading throughout to the character of Mia’s mother, though she is afforded a film-closing dance with her daughter that exemplifies the poetic realism of Arnold’s approach. That the song which unites mother and daughter in a fleeting moment of bliss is Nas’s furious “Life’s a Bitch and Then You Die” is but one of the rich tonal contrasts of this staggering film.