Fish Tank review

The Cannes Film Festival anointed a new star today: a teenager with no acting experience who was discovered having a row with her boyfriend on a station platform in Essex.

Katie Jarvis, 17, is a raw and compelling presence in every scene of Fish Tank, one of three British films competing for the Palme d’Or this year.

But while the rest of the cast and the hotly tipped director Andrea Arnold soaked up the plaudits of the cinema world, their lead actor was more or less oblivious to the fuss over her debut.

Instead Jarvis was hundreds of miles away in slightly less glamorous Basildon with her one-week-old baby Lily Mae and Brian, the long-term boyfriend she was shouting at on that fateful day at Tilbury Town railway station.

“I don’t think she really understands what this means,” Arnold said. “Festivals and things are not really part of her life.” Quite apart from missing the premiere, becoming a young mother might dissuade Jarvis from a career in acting altogether, she added.

“I went to see her about two weeks ago. She has got an agent and she’s been up for a couple of things and got them but I don’t know whether she wants to continue. I think she does but she’s just had a baby and that’s a whole other life.”

Jarvis plays Mia in the film — a headstrong, confused 15-year-old girl living in a cramped council flat, whose life is disrupted when her mother takes a boyfriend.

Although Jarvis had never acted before she poured a lot of her own experiences into the role. She left home “a long time ago”, according to Arnold, and for much of the filming was sleeping on her sister’s couch.

Robbie Ryan, the film's director of photography said: “That’s what she went home to each night. She was plucked right out of nothing. Andrea wanted someone who was the real thing.”

Arnold’s idiosyncratic shooting style probably helped Jarvis to settle — she films scenes in the order that they will feature in the film and never lets her cast read ahead in the script, which means that very little “homework” is expected from the actors.

Rashad Omar, the sound recordist said of Jarvis: “I thought she would walk after a week. It’s amazing how she picked it up.”

arvis was tired out by the gruelling filming schedule, Arnold said, partly because she refused to rest at weekends and “would go out partying or buying loads of shoes”.

“But on some level it was water off a duck’s back. There’s something about her that really did take it in her stride.”

Arnold, who won the jury prize here three years ago for her debut feature Red Road, had looked to cast a trained dancer in the role initially, because Mia’s only release from the relentlessly tough image she projects at home and on the streets is to dance, alone, to hip-hop.

When none of the actresses conmsidered by them seemed to fit the bill, casting assistants were dispatched to look for brand new talent and one of them stumbled on Jarvis.

“She was in a train station in Tilbury . . . having an argument with her boyfriend who was on the other platform,” Arnold said. “She was giving him a bit of grief and so she stood out.”

At first Jarvis refused to believe that the casting assistant was looking for someone for a film. Then she refused to dance for her audition. “We had to leave the camera in the room and go out. She hates dancing.”

Jarvis’s instant journey from unknown to festival darling stirred memories of Sam Riley in Cannes two years ago. The actor had been working in a warehouse in Leeds folding shirts when he was cast as Ian Curtis in the Joy Division biopic Control. He went on to win a stack of awards for his performance and is now attached to an adaptation of Jack Kerouac’s novel On the Road directed by Walter Salles.

Fish Tank is one of 20 films competing for the Palme d’Or which will be awarded on May 24.

Arnold said that the title was a ”good metaphor" for the film, which is set largely inside Mia’s mother’s claustrophobic flat. “There’s a lot of life in a fish tank and it’s a small space. There is a fish tank in the film but it has a hamster in it.”

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