Written By: Jamie Loftus
When walking into “The Arbor”, one doesn’t expect anything radical; after all, it’s listed as a “documentary”, so one prepares themselves for two hours of voice-over footage over clips of this and that, leading to a heartwarming conclusion. It wasn’t until the movie began that I realized I had learned to expect all these tried-and-true techniques in a documentary, and the film was certainly able to put me in my place.
The story is not terribly complex, following the life of young playwright Andrea Dunbar, a British woman from the slums who is faced with the near impossible task of juggling success, single motherhood, and her losing battle with alcohol. However, her story ends less than halfway through the film when she dies of a brain hemorrhage (in none other than a pub) in 1990 at age twenty-nine; the focus then shifts, and we see how this death came to affect her three children.
Thanks to debut director Clio Barnard’s challenging of what a documentary is, this story transition is both seamless and engaging, straying as far as possible from typical Biography Channel fare. Barnard, who has directed several documentary shorts in the past but never a feature, spent two years gathering authentic interviews with those around Andrea—most importantly her eldest daughter Lorraine, whom the latter half of the film revolves around, but we are not subjected to face-on footage of Dunbar family members shifting awkwardly. Instead, Barnard introduces us to a staged reality, using the genuine audio of Andrea Dunbar’s family lip-synched by a series of actors. This accomplishes an aesthetic unheard of in most documentaries, using a variety of angles and lighting techniques to achieve emotive visual effects while still telling the story in an authentic way.
As the film progresses from coping with Andrea’s death to her daughter Lorraine’s forays into heroin addiction and ultimately the death of her addicted son Harris in 2007, Barnard digs into archival footage of Andrea Dunbar’s career to live performances of her most famous play, “The Arbor”, right in her hometown. These elements blended with the striking performances of the actors and a diminished reliance on music—how many times has a story been drowned out by emotive synth music?—and keeps the story moving. The play, which concerns a teenage mother coping with her alcoholic father, begins to parallel Lorraine’s life to spooky proportions as the story continues.
However, the most important character in “The Arbor” never says a word. This is the setting itself, a slum in Bradford, West Yorkshire at their home, Buttershire. For the Dunbars, all roads lead back to Buttershire whether in the racist, heroin-laden 1980’s or its current bleak, recovering image. Poverty is the norm and anyone who, like Lorraine, shares any heritage that is less than white is shamed and bullied. Barnard makes it clear that Lorraine faces this struggle alone, as her two siblings, Lisa and Andrew, were parented by white men, but still leaves it to the audience member to decide which Dunbar they side with. Lisa and Andrew resent their older sister for actively speaking out and blaming their mother Andrea for her problems later in life, while Lorraine sees it as simple fact. Barnard makes her point at the film’s climax in which Lorraine’s foster parents and partial caretaker for her lost son Harris break down—at the end of the day, pointing fingers will not make a difference. With unlikely beginnings, two-year-old Harris is a poignant reminder of the destructive results of poor parenting, and whether the fault lies in Lorraine or Andrea will not bring him back.
Clio Barnard has done extensive work in studying the construction of a documentary and what makes one effective, working as an installation artist for many years before she began to create documentaries herself. By being receptive and willing to entrench herself in the depths of the Dunbar family controversies while bearing in mind her personal knowledge of the documentary structure, Barnard is able to create a masterful, heartbreaking work that pioneers the field. “The Arbor” has won Clio Barnard the Douglas Hickox Award at the British Independent Film Awards, as well as a crop of nominations from BAFTA and the London Critics Circle Film Awards, acknowledging newcomer Manjinder Virk’s masterful playing of Lorraine Dunbar and Christine Bottomley’s equally moving portrayal of middle child Lisa Thompson. Released in 2010, “The Arbor” continues to make its rounds although it never received a wide theatrical release, remaining in Boston for a few weeks and then moving on to New York.
