The Spanish Prisoner

This is the second time in the past six months that I have seen a British film in which a teenage girl has an affair with a much older man. What this says about the current state of British society, I don’t know. However, the two films, An Education and Fish Tank – both of them very good – are also very different. The first difference is class: An Education is about middle class people, while in Fish Tank, the characters are working class. The second is that while A.D. ends on an upbeat, redemptive note, F.T. is darker and more disturbing. At the end, the heroine’s future seems uncertain.

Many of the scenes in Fish Tank seem to have been shot with a hand-held camera, which gives the film a loose, spontaneous feel that I rather liked. However, at first I found it hard to become emotionally involved in this movie. This was largely because I found it hard to like the characters at first, but also because I found the English vernacular hard to follow at times. (Seriously, they should start putting subtitles on British films.) Nevertheless, I ultimately found the film moving. Highly recommended.

One small criticism: the older man in this film is apparently a security guard, yet he lives in a neighborhood that looks middle class and he drives an expensive car. I don’t know about in Britain, but here in the U.S. most security guards are paid crap money and often have to work very long hours.

This entry was posted on March 24, 2010 at 7:56 am and is filed under Cinema. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.