Fish Tank (2009)

Fish Tank arrives from 2009, a year when British social realism still trusted its audience to assemble meaning without a pamphlet. Andrea Arnold follows Mia, fifteen and at war with everyone, across a Havering council estate, and the camera never stops to explain her. The film took the Jury Prize at Cannes and a BAFTA, which suggests the establishment will reward misery when it is rendered this beautifully. It is a small, hard film that has aged into a canon entry, ranked on lists of the century's best by people who compile such things.

There is a female perspective here, and it is unsparing. Arnold grants Mia an interior life, a sexuality, and an anger that the film refuses to tidy into a lesson. She dances alone in an empty flat, drinks cider, pursues a man twice her age, and the film sits with the discomfort instead of resolving it. A woman's gaze rests on a girl's becoming, though it arrives as raw observation, not advocacy. The multiracial texture of East London drifts through the streets and the soundtrack, yet race remains scenery, never argument.

The class politics are present and deliberate. Mia's estate sits a river of taste and money away from Connor's comfortable home, and the film lets that distance speak for itself. This is social realism of the old school, which shows deprivation without prescribing an economy. The casting carries its own quiet footnote: Katie Jarvis was discovered arguing at a railway station, a non-professional dropped into a role she seemed to inhabit. Nothing here lectures. It observes, withholds, and ends on a Nas track and a bus to Wales. The result is a film of enormous empathy and no sermon at all, which is its own kind of restraint.