True Gritty (The Daily)
May 6, 2011
"The Arbor" is, despite its title, far from bucolic. The documentary examines the addicted, violent life of Andrea Dunbar, dubbed a "genius straight from the slums," who, at 19, had her autobiographical play, also called "The Arbor," performed at the renowned Royal Court Theater in London. It was a look at male violence, drunkenness and daily life in a Yorkshire council estate (what Americans call a housing project). Like her play's characters, Dunbar herself never stopped drinking and bouncing between abusive men. She was dead by the age of 29.
If the film stopped there, you'd just have another kitchen-sink realist English film with the usual story of intergenerational misery. But "The Arbor," directed by Clio Barnard, isn't just another example of the mad-and-sad-and-very-rarely-glad British council estate film. It's also part of a newer genre -- films that, after more than a decade of reality television's dominance, try get beyond the weirdness of what has become of the category of "realism." In "The Arbor," professional actors "play" Dunbar's troubled daughters; the actors' mouths move while the real voices of Dunbar's daughters are synced in. The effect is estranging and stagy, but not gimmicky. Rather, the technique reinforces how each member of the Dunbar family was, in a sense, an actor following a societal script. Somehow, the actors playing Dunbar's daughters, who give voice to neglect, racism and domestic violence and their disastrous consequences, seem more real. The artificial and odd lip-syncing technique of this remarkable documentary brings attention to the grittiness and desperate authenticity of the words being spoken.
What has instigated a need for this new kind of realism is that the formal language that used to define "true life" filmmaking no longer does the trick. To portray reality in the past, filmmakers tended to use mobile cameras, grainy film stock and, in fiction films, improvisation. But now, after so many years of shaky cams and real people revealing shocking secrets for their lenses, it takes more than this for viewers to feel reality.
"The Arbor" does this by going against the grain of cinema verité, offering up cruelly well-composed shots that read like art photographs. One powerful image in "The Arbor" is of Andrea Dunbar's deathbed: the bathroom at her favorite pub. The camera lingers on the acid-washed-jean-clad legs of an actress playing the dead Dunbar, dangling from the toilet stall. The film teems with icy, immaculately constructed images, as actors reenact disturbing scenes with creative license. This technique creates a quality that feels more convincing than many typical documentary approaches, such as Dunbar's friends recalling the playwright or opining on her death in a series of talking-head shots, would have.
"The Arbor" could have easily just joined a long list of British films about Northern English pathos: Mike Leigh's movies, the recent, brilliant "Red Riding Trilogy," and the 1986 film version of another one of Dunbar's autobiographical Yorkshire plays, "Rita, Sue and Bob, Too," dubbed "Thatcher's England with its knickers down." (It was a farce about two underclass girls in ménage a trois with a much older married man). Instead, "The Arbor" breaks from convention and shows a way forward for documentary films in a time when people are being bombarded by depictions of reality.
The distancing techniques of "The Arbor" bring us much closer to the atmosphere of opiated, violent under-mothering than do shows like the sordid A&E program "Intervention." "The Arbor" makes us recognize that much of what we consider reality can be false or simply socially conditioned. As Bertolt Brecht once wrote, "What happens all the time is not natural."