Fish Tank

The Galway Film Fleadh continued right up through my last night in Ireland. In between all the other things going on, the three of us attended a festival of Irish animation shorts, which was pretty good. We made sure to sit in the first row of the balcony, which gave us more leg room.

Fergus and Audrey also wanted to attend the closing night banquet at the boat house, the ticket for which included a screening of the closing film, Fish Tank, and English production written and directed by Andrea Arnold

I hadn't heard of the movie, but Fergus and Audrey were keen on seeing it, partly because it featured Michael Fassbender, who is a well known Irish movie actor.

The film screenings had fallen behind schedule, so we killed time in the boat house before heading over to the theater. I wasn't really keen of spending time having cramped legs, so I wound up sitting in the loge of the balcony, even though it blocked a wee bit of the screen.

The closing ceremonies were still in progress when we arrived. The president of the festival was announcing the winners of the competition. Frozen River, a movie near the top of last year's "Best" list for me, won best feature. Second place was Baraboo! Given that, I figure there couldn't have been much competition. Afterward, the president of the festival gave a special "Galway Hooker" award to Anjelica Huston, who came up on stage to receive it.

Fish Tank turned out to be an awesome movie. It's about a teenage girl named Mia (the brilliant Katie Jarvis) living in a crummy apartment complex in Essex. Her father is long-gone, and her mother is a narcissistic alcoholic who spends her time cavorting with her boyfriend Connor (Fassbender). Mia is aggressive and defensive, but she is driven to escape her situation by her talent at hip-hop dancing, which she practices in an abandoned apartment when she is able to escape her domineering mother.

The only decent adult in Mia's life seems to be Connor, who acutally holds a respectable job as the manager of a retail lumberyard. But this is 2009, and adult men are never honorable, least of all in England, where all adult males are assumed to be pedophiles until proven otherwise. Seemingly decent men are always hiding a secret of some kind, and Connor's descent is swift and dramatic in the second half of the movie, leaving Mia ten times as embittered as before, and forcing her to commit a horrible act of desperation out of revenge, or simply get attention.

In the end, after Mia learns the truth about what her future as a dancer would mean, the only honorable male character is a fellow teenager, who is still innocent. Mia's escape at the end of the movie is a victory, but it is also poignant, because one senses she will grow into being the same self-obsessed mother as her own mum.

All in all, it's a very bleak and unromantic portrait of life in the suburbs of the English cities (as well as Scotland and Ireland, according to what Fergus and Audrey said later). It reminds me of what the eugenicists have been trying to do in the British Isles: turn the masses into the very beast-like creatures that they believe the masses already are. Here is what happens from perverted social engineering and demolition of the industrial base in the name of globalism.

I highly recommend Fish Tank for when it makes it way to an arthouse cinema near you sometime in the coming year.

Afterwards, the three of us went over to the boat house, where we ditched the long line for the banquet in order to sit out on the deck drinking wine until the twilight of 11:30 pm that reflected in the river like glowing phosphorescent sea creatures. I thought I was going to go hungry, but Audrey, to her nature, went inside and somehow returned in only five minues with two heaping plates of food. She wouldn't tell us how she did, claiming it was a trade secret. I can understand that.

It was a fantastic trip to Galway, and a wonderful first trip to Ireland. There was much I didn't get the chance to do, which I will have to do, when I return soon. Even thought I was looking forward to getting back to the States, I was somewhat sad to board the bus out to Shannon Airport, and then to get on the plane.