The Arbor (2011) (Thursday, February 8, 2012) (151)

I am always interested in films that make leaps in formal conventions and are daring about how they present their information. Such is the case with Clio Bernard's film The Arbor, a pseudo-documentary about English playwright Andrea Dunbar. Bernard presents Dunbar's story as a series of actual audio interviews of Dunbar and her family recorded in the 1980s that are dubbed over actors playing the parts of these people. Most of the time the syncing is so close that we lost track of the formal process, as if the actors were simply speaking the lines of these sad, poor Yorkshire characters.

Dunbar came to some prominence and notoriety in the late 1970s with a short play called "The Arbor", which autobiographically told of her life and background. At the time she was a poor girl living in counsel estates in West Yorkshire. She wrote the play for a school project at age 15, but it was entered into a national competition, which it won. It was produced by the Royal Court Theater, with whom she would develop a brief relationship with.

From there she wrote a screenplay for the Alan Clarke film Rita, Sue and Bob Too, which was also autobiographical and dealt with many of the same characters and situations. All this time, she was generally on drugs and drunk and had three babies out of wedlock (the first was to a Pakistani man, which became the subject of her first play). She would go on to write a third play along similar lines before dying of a brain hemorrhage in 1990.

We then see how Dunbar's drug and alcohol abuse and the grinding poverty they lived in changed the lives of her kids. Her eldest daughter got hooked on drugs as well, worked as a prostitute and was convicted of killing her own baby with Methadone.

This is a very interesting, bleak look at the modern world, and one that we don't see all that often. It has the feeling of something that Andrea Arnold might have made (or Alan Clarke), and certainly feels as desperate and depressing as the story is. There is a helplessness to the whole thing that I find appealing and yet alienating. It's hard to identify with any characters because they're all so broken... and because the formalism of the piece gets in the way.

I'm not totally sure what I'm supposed to make of the this process and how I'm supposed to feel about the separation between the characters and myself that I feel. Is the point that I am as separated from them because of the dubbing as they are from one another? This is an interesting concept, an interesting Marxist technique in the midst of this anti-neo-liberal tale. I appreciate what Bernard is trying to do here more than I like the final product. I feel like it's a bit underdeveloped. Still, it's a very interesting and good film.

Stars: 3 of 4