Fish Tank (15)

Andrea Arnold, UK, 2009, 124 mins

Cast: Katie Jarvis, Michael Fassbender, Kierston Wareing

Two weeks ago, the Observer ran a poll on the best British films of the last 25 years. It made for de press ing reading. Not only because of the dearth of quality in the films voted for but also because it demonstrated the insularity and lack of cinematic awareness in a culture that thinks Trainspotting is comparable in impact to the works of Jia Zhangke, Abbas Kiarostami and Bela Tarr, to name just a few. This same culture is proud to see Andrea Arnold competing for the second time in the competition at Cannes and points to her as the “next big thing” in our country's cinema. But the international critics at Cannes were baffled; apparently, they asked Sight and Sound editor Nick James why British filmmakers are “so obsessed with...the social underclass”. And well they might, since not only does Fish Tank carry on a long tradition of the grittily realistic “kitchen sink” drama, but it does so to the point where, in its story of a disillusioned youngster who finds solace from her breadline existence in the idea of freeing a captive animal, it begs the question: why are we still making Kes 40 years on?

In Britain , daytime TV seems to have been given over to this very underclass. The Jeremy Kyle-isation of popular culture has seen the poor and uneducated open their emotional wounds to the public at 10.30 only to have their most basic platitudes and life lessons confirmed by the denizens of Loose Women at midday . And the protagonist of Fish Tank would not have looked out of place on either programme – a wayward teenager growing up in a tower block with a flaky mother moving from one boyfriend to the next, whose attitude towards her children is one of matter-of-fact necessity. There is no atmosphere of care or nurturing and school is a different country – people do things differently there.

But it's not just in the social details that Fish Tank resembles daytime television; there's also its aesthetic ambition. You want groundbreaking, taboo-busting drama, it'll be post watershed. You want challenging and original television that, formally and aesthetically, requires the audience to work a little harder, it'll be on BBC 4 or some other digital station. Daytime TV, by contrast, is the place for nice, goes-down-easy mush. At its best, it's entertaining and stimulating without doing anything new or being the slightest bit subversive. Fish Tank par excellence.

If all this sounds a little patronising, let me hasten to add that Arnold is a director of considerable talent. She has drawn superb performances from her cast, all the more im press ive when you consider that the lead Katie Jarvis was picked off the streets and had never acted before. But she's immediately convincing, as is Michael Fassbender, a rising star, and the rest of the cast, all the way down to little Rebecca Griffiths, who plays the protagonist's little sister and swears like a good 'un. Arnold 's pacing and editing is first-rate and her sense of milieu makes the world of the film concrete and compelling. She also has an eye – ordinary places like working warehouses become transformed through the beautifully-composed shots of cranes reaching into the sky beyond the hangar doors – while the sound design picks up on snatches of background conversation that add to the atmosphere of casual violence. And her control of the sensual range of the audio-visual spectrum is most apparent in the way she evokes the physical attraction of Fassbender's male interloper – you can almost smell his freshly-laundered shirts, feel his body reach out of the screen towards you. Furthermore, the theme of parental abandonment fostering equally vicious filial rejection is well developed. Indeed, if the film disturbed me in any way, it was in how much I enjoyed it, provoking a mild crisis of faith in someone, who has always held that the most progressive work is the most emotionally stimulating.

The problems lie in the material. The idea of a young person with no opportunities transcending their tawdry little world is so old hat that it doesn't need trite symbols like balloons floating into the air or the easy-come immediacy of hand-held shots to further hammer home the lack of originality. As with Red Road , Arnold's first feature, a good set-up is let down by a hollowness at the centre of the project; there is an innate understanding of the world under the microscope, but once the plot has to start moving and thoughts need to translate into action, the results are empty gestures of anger that lead nowhere and mean even less. Indeed, in filmmaking terms, Fish Tank is more confident than Red Road , but in terms of narrative drama, it's a step back.

Which is why what Arnold needs more than anything now is not applause – hence this griping review – but a warning. If she was working in France , a producer would note her skill, take her in hand and push her towards more unconventional projects. But in a country where the middle-class are forever in awe of lower-class nobility and venerate social dogmatism as the highest form of achievement, as opposed to the messy business of personal ex press ion, i.e. Art, she'll be encouraged to flounder around in her own self-dug grave. How I would love to see her move away from the supermarkets and the spin-dryers to the machines of imagination. If she must make films about tower blocks, then how about an adaptation of JG Ballard's High Rise ? If she must concentrate on those on the margins of society, how about the boozy 1930s world of Patrick Hamilton? Or a period drama or a comedy about vampires – anything. Anything that will stretch her, that will give her a universe to imagine at a tangent to her talent and sensibility – always where the most fascinating work comes from. Anything, in short, that will lift her from the three in the afternoon slot of the cinema world and into the juicy terrain of late-night digital on the arts channel.