Changing gears rather significantly from my last few posts, The Arbor, from U.K. director Clio Barnard, is a harrowing, but kinetic quasi-documentary that will enthrall hardcore fans of kitchen sink realism and find the rest running screaming from the room. Structurally, it’s a remarkable film: conceptually unusual, hard hitting and almost impossibly sad. It explores the life, but more often the legacy, of Andrea Dunbar, a working-class West Yorkshire playwright who died in 1990 at the age of 29 from an alcohol-related brain hemorrhage. At the time of her death, Dunbar had written three semi-autobiographical plays about the struggles working-class people faced and had three children, all from different fathers.
The film is an amalgam of three unique and intertwined formats. The first is what remains of the archival footage of Andrea and her family, a series of brief interviews and footage of several television adaptations of her plays. The second thread contains a running series of interconnected scenes from Dunbar’s works mounted in the neighbourhood where they were conceived. The final piece involves actors lip-syncing recorded audio from the surviving members of the Dunbar clan and while it might sound like an odd way to tell the story, it serves to tie together the film and narrative arc surprisingly well.
Most of the film is concentrated on the tragic story of Dunbar’s eldest daughter, Lorraine, whose father was Pakistani and who has struggled with many of the same addictions and problems her mother faced. It’s a tough and uncompromising story that explores some grim social territory and while it isn’t to all tastes, for those interested in exploring the implications of fractured families and a broken society, you’d be hard pressed to find a more informative film than The Arbor.
The Arbor (2010)
The film is an amalgam of three unique and intertwined formats. The first is what remains of the archival footage of Andrea and her family, a series of brief interviews and footage of several television adaptations of her plays. The second thread contains a running series of interconnected scenes from Dunbar’s works mounted in the neighbourhood where they were conceived. The final piece involves actors lip-syncing recorded audio from the surviving members of the Dunbar clan and while it might sound like an odd way to tell the story, it serves to tie together the film and narrative arc surprisingly well.
Most of the film is concentrated on the tragic story of Dunbar’s eldest daughter, Lorraine, whose father was Pakistani and who has struggled with many of the same addictions and problems her mother faced. It’s a tough and uncompromising story that explores some grim social territory and while it isn’t to all tastes, for those interested in exploring the implications of fractured families and a broken society, you’d be hard pressed to find a more informative film than The Arbor.
La Sporgenza
Thursday, October 27th, 2011 at 8:59 am