Lone Scherfig’s glamourous BBC film An Education and Andrea Arnold’s realist social-anatomy Fish Tank are perhaps the most successful and consistently praised British films of last year, and are now Britain’s last line of defence against the juggernaut of Avatar rumbling slowly towards a sustained sweep and clear of every awards show in sight. But despite their stark differences in setting, period and style, the films are ostensibly very similar.
Both films feature gently subversive subject matter. They both, in Michael Fassbender and Peter Sarsgaard, contain troubled, predatory and egregiously male performances. They both introduce, in sensational style, two very fine young actresses in Carey Mulligan and Katie Jarvis who, in their separate ways, rage against the confines of their upbringing. And both films illustrate different layers of a very resilient and entrenched British class system.
An Education fetishises the period glamour of the early ’60s as ardently as its heroine, it is as much an affirmation of middle-class culture as a critique. Mulligan’s Jenny may feel trapped within the boundaries of her cloyingly anxious suburban upbringing, but she also uses it as a secure nest to which she can return.
By revolving the film to such a degree around this bright young thing, the film communicates a simple but enduring message – Jenny can do anything she wants with her life. She has the intelligence, the charm, the capacity and, most importantly, the social structures to support her. Despite Sarsgaard’s ‘education’ in transgression, the world remains her oyster.
In Fish Tank, the milieu of Mia’s life – the grey, graffiti’d uniformity of her domiciled home, the rubbish on the streets and the rot on TV – is the visual upholstering to a cripplingly low glass ceiling. In comparison to Mulligan’s character, Katie Jarvis’s Mia has nothing she can rely on, nobody to support her or decide how her life will pan out. When she tears up her housing estate, or dances alone with only her private aspirations for company, there is only one consistent surety. This place has been marginalised by society and, as a result, she will struggle to leave it. Her confusion, impulsiveness and anger, it seems, are wholly justified.
The careers of these two new actresses will be interesting to follow. Mulligan is a privately educated girl from an affluent background who got her break from Julian Fellowes when he invited her to dinner before hooking her up with a well established casting agent, who has so far secured her six films which are all currently in pre-production.
Jarvis is an untrained actor plucked straight out of the Essex housing estates in which the film is set. In what sounds like a beautiful moment of serendipity, she was spotted by the film’s casting assistant having an argument with her boyfriend at Tilbury train station. It is hoped she will be on our screens for years to come but, in this most nepotistic of industries, her future may regrettably be less sure.
In the lead-up to the election, both of Britain’s main political partners are battling over class lines. Cameron will continue to expound his ‘broken Britain’ rhetoric, suggesting that every murder, rape and abuse is a further example of his theory. Brown will preach the value of meritocracy whilst attempting to convince that his liberally-minded manipulation of capitalism is still a valid post-recession model. In truth, both approaches are deeply flawed.
An Education and Fish Tank are stylistically divergent parables of innocence lost. But, despite their differences, they provide a unified message; Britain’s societal structures are prone to perpetuate and, for good or for worse, are going nowhere fast.
