At the age of fifteen, Andrea Dunbar’s first play debuted at the Royal Court Theatre in London. Thirteen years later, she was dead, a victim of the self-destructive behavior she chronicled in her dramas. The lasting effects of her deficiencies as a mother are illustrated in Clio Barnard’s The Arbor, a radically self-conscious departure from traditional documentary forms, which won the Best New Documentary Filmmaker Award at this year’s Tribeca Film Festival.Deliberating blurring documentary and dramatic filmmaking, Barrnard recorded extensive interviews with the Dunbar’s family and friends. However, instead of showing them on camera, she filmed a cast of actors lip-synching their spoken words. She also staged a production of Dunbar’s first play, The Arbor, in an open space near the low income housing estate that inspired the playwright’s work. Barnard’s only bow to convention are clips from a BBC profile of Dunbar interspersed throughout the film.
Obviously, Dunbar’s plays were largely based on her experiences and observations of life on the Bafferton Arbor Estate. However, the theatricality of Barnard’s approach completely blurs any distinction between author and character. As biography, this might be problematic, but as cinema, it is fascinating.
It quickly becomes apparent Dunbar was never mother of the year. While her son and younger daughter might have survived her parenting with relatively few emotional scars that was clearly not the case for Lorraine, her bi-racial eldest daughter. Unfortunately, as Arbor shifts its focus to Lorraine, its unorthodox format loses some of its power. While Andrea Dunbar was a true enfant terrible of British drama, Lorraine’s story is hardly remarkable. She might be a tragic figure, but she is hardly the first to succumb to drug addiction as a result of a chaotic family environment.
Though it is often devilishly difficult for Yankee ears to decipher the thick Yorkshire accents, it is often hard to tell the cast is lip-synching. Indeed, their mannerisms and body language seems perfectly matc
hed to their disembodied words. Manjinder Virk is particularly convincing as the problematic Lorraine.Given the intentionally artificial nature of Arbor, it arguably pushes its luck, running a bit longer than it should. Still, it is bold filmmaking. In fact, it is probably the fullest, most successful manifestation of post-modernism in documentary filmmaking. As a Tribeca award winner, it screens again today (5/2) as the festival concludes.
