Not so fishy

I've put off watching Fish Tank for a long time. Garlanded with praise, it felt to me like another of those tiresomely wretched British dramas that is fixated with the dull, pointless lives of the underclasses, painting them as being as stereotypically depressing and amoral as all us good middle-class people believe them to be.


And so, largely, it turned out to be, except it was lit by the passion of a couple of the central performances, and by a chilling section of child abduction that was as gripping as it was horrific.


One of the central performances was Katie Jarvis, rightly praised for an astonishing debut, seen above in the bleak badlands where impoverished east London bleeds into the flatlands of Thames-side Essex.


The other outstanding performance was by Michael Fassbender, fast becoming the star of choice in a wide range of fascinating (if not always successful) projects -- here in Inglourious Basterds:


And in 300:


And, perhaps most successfully, in Hunger:


Fassbender is a chameleon, able to parlay himself into roles requiring very different styles and emotions:


In Fish Tank, he exudes a cheap but potent charm, offering a simulacrum of warmth to a girl-woman who has been starved of gentleness, kindness and consistency. Unsurprisingly, she utterly falls for it.


As do we.