"Fish Tank": Coming of Age in an English Housing Project

A couple weeks ago, I finally got around to watching Andrea Arnold's 2009 film Fish Tank, winner of the Jury Prize at the Cannes Film Festival.  Images from it have come into my mind every day since.

Now available on a Criterion DVD, it can also be watched instantly on Netflix.  Here's the Criterion blurb:

SYNOPSIS: British director Andrea Arnold won the Cannes Jury Prize for the intense and invigorating Fish Tank, about a fifteen-year-old girl, Mia (electrifying newcomer Katie Jarvis), who lives with her mother and sister in the housing projects of Essex. Mia’s adolescent conflicts and emerging sexuality reach a boiling point when her mother’s new boyfriend (a lethally attractive Michael Fassbender) enters the picture. In her young career, Arnold has already proven herself to be a master of social realism, evoking the work of Mike Leigh and Ken Loach; and she invests her sympathetic portraits of dead-end lives with a poetic, earthy sensibility all her own. Fish Tank heralds the official arrival of a major new filmmaker.

The Criterion WEBSITE for the film has the trailer and one of their great "Three Reasons" videos for it, along with several articles.  Here's the trailer:

I like what Peter Rainer had to say in The Christian Science Monitor:

"Because Arnold hews the film so close to Mia's hurts, what might come across as a downer instead often has a startling immediacy. Only bad movies are depressing movies. "Fish Tank," for all its faults and vagaries, brings us up close to a fully realized human being, and that's revivifying.
Jarvis, who had no previous acting experience, was accidentally discovered by Arnold when she overhead the girl arguing with her boyfriend in a train station. Arnold was right to go with her instincts in casting an untrained unknown: Jarvis has an openness to the camera that a more accomplished performer might have lacked. Her acting has a moment-to-moment excitement because we can never tell what Mia will do."

I think it's worth your time.