comparitive essay Fish tank /Precious

In the fish tank, the character ‘Mia’ seems be the typical British teenager living in a counsel estate in England. However behind all of this façade, this teenager is seen to be physically abused in her home, searching for an escape that seems more desirable to her than anything. Similarly, Precious denotes the same matters when it is clear that precious gets physically abused by her mother as well. This is very interesting as both these characters seem to lack a responsible parent around and both seem to be deprived from standard living areas.

However, both these characters are very much different one way because of the way they choose to escape from reality, Mia for instance dances to free her herself from the pending problems of family life. Precious chooses to fantasize about romance and fame, being loved by everyone. This begs the question of whether these films are connoting that people who live in these cancel estate or welfare apartments have nothing but there dreams and hopes to live on.

In the Guardian newspaper online, one review of Fish Tank seems to have picked out a certain idealism that the film has. This could denote that the film seem to be idealising how people expect things to happen and how a turn of events could change everything. In the precious the turning point was freedom from her mother, and expressing her dark memories of what she had experienced as a child. This puts thing in to perspective for the audience because it creates a moment of reflection. Most of the people who had watched this film were White middle class people , and they had enjoyed it because it wasn’t something they were faced with. This was a film heavy set in a Black community, and the only white characters you would see were of higher authority. This film clearly outraged many of the Black community who didn’t want to be portrayed in the certain way.

In Fish Tank there were praises in the film critic circle for the film having a sense of realism .This could mean that people did agree with the fact that Britain and White British teenagers were simply this way, looking for freedom from a council estate flat and an abusive mother.

The one thing that was very much different from Precious was the inter- mixing of different cultures. This film seemed acknowledging of different styles of music and culture, most notably Afro-Caribbean culture   .