The Arbor (Clio Barnard, 2010)
Posted: Fri Sep 10, 2010 10:55 pm
I didn't have especially high hopes for this, as it was marketed as a documentary about the playwright Andrea Dunbar, whose short life (she died at 29) has already been done to death by the British media - there have now been more works about her (two television documentaries, the play A State Affair and this) than works by her (three plays, of which Rita, Sue and Bob Too is the best known).
Oh me of little faith, because I've rarely been so impressed by a new British film. Inspired by the technique used in A State Affair, in which edited interviews with real people were converted into stage monologues performed by actors, Barnard went one stage further and used the actual recordings of Dunbar's family, friends and associates, which are lip-synched onscreen by actors. Which on paper sounded impractically arch, but it works brilliantly onscreen - this interview with Barnard includes clips from the opening scene, in which Dunbar's daughters reminisce about setting fire to the bed because they were cold, and then discovering that they'd been locked in the room while their mother was in the pub. If staged in a conventional drama, it would be an atmosphere of blind panic, which is undoubtedly what it was in real life, but Barnard's cool, precisely composed images, with her characters calmly discussing this incident as the bed burns behind them, paradoxically results in intensifying the details. Errol Morris does something similar, though this is even more stylised.
What I found most exhilarating about the film is the way that it both represented a logical development of Dunbar's own strongly autobiographical plays and an implicit critique of the way she drew on the lives of real and clearly identifiable people - there's a recurring motif of the film's characters watching themselves or representations of themselves in various media: news reports, stage monologues, open-air performances of Dunbar's first play (also called The Arbor). The mixed-race (half-British half-Pakistani) daughter of the girl in that was Dunbar's own daughter Lorraine, who is in fact the film's most important character, and her horrific life story after her mother's death dominates the second half - it's a seemingly endless procession of rape, drug addiction, prostitution, pregnancy and the loss of multiple children through accidental death or the intervention of social services, and the fact that she was the daughter of a famous writer made no difference whatsoever. In fact, it may have exacerbated the problem, as it ensured that any missteps would be gleefully covered by sensation-hungry tabloids (example).
Oh me of little faith, because I've rarely been so impressed by a new British film. Inspired by the technique used in A State Affair, in which edited interviews with real people were converted into stage monologues performed by actors, Barnard went one stage further and used the actual recordings of Dunbar's family, friends and associates, which are lip-synched onscreen by actors. Which on paper sounded impractically arch, but it works brilliantly onscreen - this interview with Barnard includes clips from the opening scene, in which Dunbar's daughters reminisce about setting fire to the bed because they were cold, and then discovering that they'd been locked in the room while their mother was in the pub. If staged in a conventional drama, it would be an atmosphere of blind panic, which is undoubtedly what it was in real life, but Barnard's cool, precisely composed images, with her characters calmly discussing this incident as the bed burns behind them, paradoxically results in intensifying the details. Errol Morris does something similar, though this is even more stylised.
What I found most exhilarating about the film is the way that it both represented a logical development of Dunbar's own strongly autobiographical plays and an implicit critique of the way she drew on the lives of real and clearly identifiable people - there's a recurring motif of the film's characters watching themselves or representations of themselves in various media: news reports, stage monologues, open-air performances of Dunbar's first play (also called The Arbor). The mixed-race (half-British half-Pakistani) daughter of the girl in that was Dunbar's own daughter Lorraine, who is in fact the film's most important character, and her horrific life story after her mother's death dominates the second half - it's a seemingly endless procession of rape, drug addiction, prostitution, pregnancy and the loss of multiple children through accidental death or the intervention of social services, and the fact that she was the daughter of a famous writer made no difference whatsoever. In fact, it may have exacerbated the problem, as it ensured that any missteps would be gleefully covered by sensation-hungry tabloids (example).