Fish tank

The critics love it (88% on the RT roster). It won a Cannes Jury prize (2009). Fish Tank, Andrea Arnold's second feature film, confirms the promise of her first, the award-winning Red Road. It's nominated for BAFTAs in 2010, and one of them would be a worthy companion to the Oscar that Arnold won for her 2005 short feature, Wasp. She's a former British children's TV performer who has made a very successful quantum career leap.

The problem for any movie buff of my age is that gritty social realism was done, and done so well, way back when Ken Loach, Mike Leigh and other politically motivated directors ploughed the field. Following their lead, Arnold has written and directed a modern working-class immorality tale, but is it different enough from the older generation's work to become a classic too?

It could and should. Especially if it's always screened with English subtitles. That will mean spelling out a heck of a lot of expletives, but it will have the crucial benefit of helping non-Essex audiences follow plotlines better in a coming-of-age dramedy set in profanity-drenched flatlands. Arnold clearly enjoys dialect challenges, and didn't let her work on the Glasgow-set Red Road discourage her from tackling another.

It's made depressingly clear that no sensitive person would choose to live in Essex, where scruffy council flats (even duplexes with balconies), stark wastelands (even when edged with marshes and a stark wind turbine), characterless suburban bungalows (especially when flanked by industrial chimneys) and grey shopping streets fill a social and moral quagmire. The movie's anti-heroine, 15-year-old Mia, has few hopes in Hell of finding a way out, and newcomer Katie Jarvis is gloriously credible as a foul-mouthed, mean-spirited child yearning for love, especially self-love. Like the old horse she yearns to set free, Mia seems chained to her place in society.

But she seems doomed to follow her single mum into an adulthood of boredom relieved only by disco music, drink and sex. As so often in British movies, the secondary characters are depicted impeccably. Above all, Michael Fassbender presents a mesmerising portrait of the conflicted emotions in Mia's mother's too-good-to-be-real boyfriend. With further juicy roles like this, the German-born Ireland-raised London-based actor (triumphant in Hunger and professionally understated in Inglourious Basterds) could become an international star a la Day-Lewis and Depardieu.

Ms Arnold's scripted solution to Mia's dead-end existence avoids the socio-political morbid-cum-merry melodramatics of earlier Brit movie realists. Mia abandons family and home, accepting without any enthusiasm a chance to escape from the flatlands. Wales can't be worse than Essex, can it?

The final scenes of the movie are heart-wrenching shrugs, with an inspired dance routine from a family of females united in repressed screams. The modern British Generation Gap is shown to be brutally short.