Mise en Scene Essay

Mise en Scene is a French term that basically means everything that's already in a scene before the camera gets involved. Setting, lighting, costumes, placement of props, etc. I watched a British indy film for this paper and it was... an experience.
I did get half a point marked off for discussing the plot too much in this paper, but you'll get over it. hahaha.

An Analysis of Mise En Scène as Employed by “Fish Tank”

Fish Tank immediately thrusts us into the life of this girl named Mia, who is, most succinctly, volatile in demeanor.  Mia lives in Essex, one of London’s biggest counties and referred to as “London’s backyard.” Andrea Arnold, the director, explained her choice to set Fish Tank in Essex with “I drove out from east London and loved it straight away. The madness of the A13, the steaming factories and the open spaces, the wilderness.”

And Fish Tank definitely employs both of those sides of the city in its dark, largely run-down, claustrophobic flats and neighborhood streets and the enormous, agoraphobic, blindingly-bright green spaces around the urban areas. The film takes what is an otherwise ordinary location and spins into it mystique and charm via complex relationship developments, character interactions and perpetual conflict.

The tight spaces of the flats force a level of intimacy in familial relations and can easily work to incubate dysfunction. We find that Mia and her little sister Taylor have acquired from their mother a love of cheap convenience store alcohol as well as a set of violent defense mechanisms to mask emotional pain or vulnerability: Mia, Taylor and their mom automatically lash out viciously any time any one of them is upset, startled, confused or frightened. The instant one lashes out, the next returns the motion, and before long, all three members of the family unit are screaming and cursing at each other, calling each other “stupid cunts”, “fucking bitches,” or any other colorful thing they can come up with.

Once all of this violence has been sufficiently displayed, the film takes us up into Mia’s bedroom, where we are suddenly swathed in soft pastels—purples and greens with pokka-dots and flowers, a tiger poster on her door. Suddenly, Mia isn’t just a violent, angry 15-year-old, she’s a girl.

Alongside the pastels, we’re introduced to Mia’s deep-set devotion to and love of animals when she encounters a malnourished horse chained to a cinderblock and tries to free it until she’s caught. She returns later with a hammer to finish the job, but only has time to get close to the horse and really look at her before she’s found by two men who then try to rape her, bringing the hardness of violence back into the soft moment she takes refuge in.

Almost immediately, there’s a sense of sexual tension between Mia and Connor, Joann’s new, mysterious boyfriend. The tension is complicated, however, because it almost flip-flops between her physical attraction to him and her desire for a father figure, which allows the viewer to understand that what Mia’s really desperate for is someone to truly love her and actually demonstrate that affection because her family is incapable. The flip-flopping starts relatively distinctly—the compliment that sets the tension versus taking the family to the country—but then soon the lines between what’s sexual tension and what’s desire for love or family begin to blur.

All of this finally comes to a head in what is likely the most dramatic moment of the entire movie. It’s late at night and Connor puts her drunken mother to bed before she meets him downstairs in their living room, and she performs for him the dance that she’d been putting together for her live audition. The light from the street lamps and headlights outside the window create for the scene a honey-colored haze that makes an otherwise (for the viewer) awkward moment notably intimate, visibly seductive. This dance inevitably leads to the couple having sex on the couch. What should be disturbing to the viewer is suddenly made unnervingly beautiful and passionate, though when it’s over we all realize how dishonest that beauty and passion was.

The next morning, Connor leaves with no intention to return. When Mia tracks him down, she breaks into his house and then discovers that he has his own family that he had been keeping from them—a wife and a daughter probably half Mia’s age. Spiteful, Mia pees on his living room floor and then steals his daughter, but inevitably brings her back. Walking back home in the dark, Connor tracks her down, chases her through a field and then slaps her across the face, stares at her and then walks away without a trace.

Mia goes to her audition and finds a group of overly sexualized girls dancing like they want to be taken on stage and she walks out.

She goes to meet up with her boyfriend and finds out that the old horse she’d grown so fond of had gotten sick and they’d had to shoot her.

Suddenly, everything that Mia has, or had, is violently wrenched from her grasp and she’s left crying on the ground with no direction, no plans, no ideas—until her boyfriend invites her to go to Wales with her.

In the second-most moving scene of the movie, Mia goes home to pack her things and then dances with her mother in the living room when she announces she’s leaving. The dance represents the small element of sensitivity in otherwise unsympathetic characters and allows us to understand that it’s a reconciliation of sorts.

The movie ends when Mia escapes from her life and into a realm of something that she’s heretofore unfamiliar with: Hope. Hope in a new beginning.