Fish Tank: The Other London

BBC Films

Watch as many Hugh Grant movies as I did over Christmas and you’d be forgiven for thinking that all Londoners lived in stucco-fronted Georgian villas within walking distance of Hampstead Heath. 

But if you want an insight into what life is like for some of the less fortunate citizens of that sprawling city, go and see Fish Tank, which is set in Barking, a desolate suburb of East London crowded with industrial estates and junkyards and crisscrossed with motorways.

The film follows 15-year-old Mia, who lives on a council estate with her single mother and younger sister, a deliverer of perfect one-liners who, along with the tumbleweed, deserves a best supporting actress nomination.

Cider-drinking, head-butting, four-letter-word-squawking Mia (brilliantly played by Katie Jarvis who was spotted arguing with her boyfriend at a railway station and had no acting experience) doesn’t exactly have the world at her feet. But she can dance. Redemption comes, for a while, in the form of Mia’s mum’s new Irish boyfriend, Connor. And then things take a turn for the even worse.

Billy Elliot? No. Depressing, yes. But, like a pre-Happy Go Lucky Mike Leigh, Fish Tank is also funny and entertaining, and director Andrea Arnold (a woman!) gives the bleak landscape, bathed in England’s low summer light, a rare, unexpected beauty.