Mia (Katie Jarvis) hopes there's more to life in FISH TANK
FISH TANK (Andrea Arnold, 2009)
Opens Friday, January 15
IFC Center, 323 Sixth Ave. at Third St.
212-924-7771
Lincoln Plaza Cinema, 1886 Broadway between 62nd & 63rd Sts.
212-757-2280
www.lincolnplazacinema.com
www.ifccenter.com
www.fishtankmovie.com
Writer-director Andrea Arnold follows up her brilliant, harrowing feature debut, 2006’s RED ROAD, with the brilliant, highly perceptive, and emotionally gripping FISH TANK. Katie Jarvis, a seventeen-year-old discovered by Arnold while the girl was arguing with her boyfriend on a train station platform, had never acted before and was not a dancer, but Arnold cast her in the lead role of Mia, a fifteen-year-old troubled kid who dreams of becoming a professional hip-hop dancer as her only way out of her drab life. A loner quick to curse and fight, Mia lives with her mother, Joanne (Kierston Wareing), who loves to drink and party, and her little sister, Tyler (Rebecca Griffiths making her acting debut as well). When her mother starts dating Connor (Michael Fassbender), Mia soon turns to him for help and advice, but their relationship threatens to grow much too close and far too dangerous. Arnold shot the film in chronological order, giving each actor only parts of the script at a time, so virtually every scene of FISH TANK feels fresh and genuine, with natural, believable actions and reactions. While Wareing and Fassbender (HUNGER and 300) are excellent, the film belongs to the remarkable Jarvis, who will break your heart over and over again.
French auteur André Téchiné (RENDEZ-VOUS, WILD REEDS), who specializes in deeply emotional dramas, follows up the wholly unnecessary AIDS film WITNESSES with the equally unnecessary THE GIRL ON THE TRAIN. Adapted from a play by Jean-Marie Besset based on a real-life scandal, the films stars the charming Emilie Dequenne as Jeanne, a young woman trying to find her place in the world. Flighty and flakey, Jeanne agrees to go on a job interview with a high-powered lawyer, Samuel Bleistein (Michel Blanc), whom her mother, Louise (Catherine Deneuve), used to work for and nearly had an extramarital fling with. But when Jeanne’s burgeoning relationship with a suspicious wrestler named Franck (Nicolas Devauchelle) ends in extreme violence, she acts out in a way that results in a national scandal built on lies. As with WITNESSES, THE GIRL ON THE TRAIN has little to say about its subject matter. The characters seem lost, wandering around aimlessly in Téchiné’s misguided story, and Jeanne feels particularly outdated and irrelevant even though she’s the title character. Téchiné, who divides the film into two parts, “Circumstances” and “Consequences,” admits to having significantly changed both the actual events and the play; perhaps he should have left well enough alone.
The Hughes brothers’ postapocalyptic thriller, THE BOOK OF ELI, looks great, and star and producer Denzel Washington is great, but as the story continually teases the audience with a series of more and more ridiculous “revelations,” the film devolves into a jaw-droppingly awful mess. Washington plays the walker, a man who has been journeying west across a desolate land laid low by a war that ended three decades before, leaving death and destruction in its wake. He’s on a mission, carrying with him a treasured book, the last of its kind, and he’s well equipped to protect it with his life — and with an arsenal of supercool weapons that he uses on deranged men roaming around looking for people to rob and women to rape. But soon he finds himself in a no-horse town run by the villainous Carnegie (Gary Oldman), who thinks he can expand his domain if only he could get his grubby hands on a book that he’s been searching for — and that the walker just happens to have and is not about to give up. Things really start falling apart once Solara (Mila Kunis), the daughter of Carnegie’s blind girlfriend (Jennifer Beals), decides to join the walker on the run. THE BOOK OF ELI is a mad mix of THE ROAD WARRIOR, THE PASSION OF THE CHRIST, YOJIMBO, HIGH PLAINS DRIFTER, FAHRENHEIT 451, and not at all in a good way. You’re much better off sitting down for a few hours and reading a good book.
Australian brothers Michael and Peter Spierig, who played with the zombie genre in their feature-length debut, 2003’s UNDEAD, dig their teeth into vampires in their follow-up, DAYBREAKERS. It’s 2019, and the world has been turned upside down — one infected bat has led to ninety-five percent of the population being vampires, living in a nocturnal society that shuts down during the day. At night, the vamps put on their suits, board the subways, and go to work, getting their blood at coffee shops and acting fairly normal. But with the dwindling supply of human blood — as humanity itself is on the brink of extinction — some vampires are turning into evil, bloodthirsty winged creatures ready to tear apart anything, including themselves, for a shot of the red stuff.
The first half of Corneliu Porumboiu’s POLICE, ADJECTIVE is as dreadfully boring as detective Cristi’s (Dragos Bucur) assignment, tailing a student, Victor (Radu Costin), who enjoys a joint with two of his friends every day after school. While Cristi wants to nail the kid’s supplier, the cop’s boss has him on a tight deadline, insisting he arrest Victor if the investigation continues to go nowhere, but Cristi strongly disagrees with putting the teenager away for up to seven years for a crime he believes will soon be abolished by the government. However, the film picks up considerably as Cristi seeks help from various contacts, getting caught up in red tape and public servants who would really rather not be bothered. And when he gets called in by the chief (Vlad Ivanov from 4 MONTHS, 3 WEEKS, and 2 DAYS) and gets a long lecture in linguistics, well, you won’t be able to control yourself from laughing out loud. Porumboiu (12:08 EAST OF BUCHAREST) keeps the pace very slow and very steady, but hang in there, because the end is a riot. POLICE, ADJECTIVE won the Un Certain Regard Jury Prize at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, screened at the New York Film Festival and at MoMA as part of the “Contenders, 2009,” series, and is Romania’s official entry for the Foreign Language Film Academy Award.