The Arbor
Clio Barnard (2010)
Clio Barnard’s film is about the writer Andrea Dunbar, who became famous at the age of eighteen through her autobiographical play The Arbor, staged at the Royal Court in 1980 and subsequently in New York. Dunbar had a further success with Rita, Sue and Bob, Too! a couple of years later: like The Arbor, this was set in a run-down part of Bradford, where the author grew up and continued to live. She developed serious alcohol problems before dying of a brain haemorrhage in the toilets of a local pub a few days before Christmas 1989. Barnard’s film is also about the family that survived Andrea, especially her elder daughter Lorraine, who has spent much of her young life in prison – most notoriously for the manslaughter of her infant son Harris. Lorraine was a heroin addict and the baby boy exhibited persistent signs of drug addiction before swallowing the teaspoon of methadone that killed him at the age of two.
Barnard presents the material in three different ways. There are clips from television documentaries about Andrea Dunbar and her family (an Arena programme screened in March 1980 and another documentary made a year before her death). There are performances of scenes from the stage play The Arbor. (To distinguish between references to these and to the film itself, I’m going to call the stage play Brafferton Arbor, the street where Dunbar lived and which ‘the Arbor’ is short for. According to Max Stafford-Clark, the manuscript for the play originally submitted by Dunbar to the Young Writers’ Festival at the Royal Court – in green ink, in an exercise book – was headed ‘Brafferton Arbor’.) These are outdoor sequences shot on the Buttershaw estate in Bradford with an audience of onlookers standing outside houses and round about. (A few of these are actors playing 2010 versions of people who knew Andrea Dunbar; most of them are, we assume, people who actually live on the estate now.) Sometimes the excerpts from Brafferton Arbor are open-air theatre with no pretence at naturalism – the actors sit al fresco on the three-piece suite that was presumably used for the stage set, or on chairs which are meant to represent the seats on a bus. Sometimes the excerpts are staged as if they were part of a cinema piece – the Andrea character in the play walks down the street with the Asian man whose child she’s carrying or sits on a wall talking with one or other of the neighbourhood girls. The third and most striking element of The Arbor consists of actors lip-synching the words of the people actually involved with Andrea Dunbar and whom Barnard interviewed and recorded for the film.
The interviews with Lorraine Dunbar presumably took place while she was inside (we see the actress playing her coming out of a jail right at the end of the film) – and the style adopted by Barnard may have something to do with protecting the visual identity of Lorraine and others. But this clearly doesn’t apply to people who are already well known, like Max Stafford-Clark, who describes at one point going back to the Buttershaw estate in 2000 and interviewing people there. What was said in those interviews subsequently comprised the script of a play, A State Affair, devised by Robin Soans and also performed at the Royal Court. (Gary Whittaker, one of the cast of A State Affair, is the only person in the film who plays himself but he appears, for the sake of consistency, to be lip-synching his own words rather than speaking them normally. I think I noticed that the credits show the character as ‘Whittaker’ and the actor as ‘Whitaker’ as if to respect this distinction.) It seems likely that the way A State Affair developed is a main inspiration for the pivotal dramatic mode of The Arbor. And because Andrea Dunbar put her life on stage in Brafferton Arbor it seems fitting (and to an extent ironic) for her posthumous legacy to be dramatised in the way chosen by Barnard.
There are some major stylistic snags, though. The scenes from Brafferton Arbor are presented and performed uncertainly. The actors are speaking lines that were part of a theatre script; much of their style of acting comes over as stage acting (given that the play’s dialogue seems to consist largely of extended, heated arguments, less of it is overlapping than you would expect on screen, let alone in real life). Yet Barnard and her director of photography Ole Bratt Birkeland shoot some of these exchanges as if they were conventional screen sequences – close-ups, reaction shots etc, which expose the mismatch between the camera style and the performance style. In the first half of the film, which focuses on Andrea Dunbar’s life, the excerpts from the play (and, to a lesser extent, the lip-synching sequences) are upstaged by the documentary clips. These reveal the Dunbar family as both more complex and, especially in the case of the father, more extraordinary looking than their counterparts in the dramatised version of their lives. There’s an especially strong moment when the Arena interviewer asks Mr Dunbar if he’s going to go to London to see his daughter’s play. He explains that his wife’s going but he has to stay and look after some of the other kids. (Andrea was one of eight.) You sense both his relief that he’s got this excuse and that he doesn’t really expect it to be believed.
To start with, I feared that I would watch the lip-synching actors and do no more than assess their technical skill in carrying this off. When an actor as recognisable as, say, Neil Dudgeon appears and speaks, it’s initially disorienting to hear a voice that isn’t his own when he moves his lips; you also wonder if the actor feels deprived by being silenced. But he and others win you over. They connect fully with their lines; they also use these words to create their own truth in what they give us to see in their faces and movements. This is especially true of Dudgeon and Monica Dolan (as Steve and Ann, the couple who fostered both Andrea’s and Lorraine’s children at various times), George Costigan (as the second of the three men by whom Andrea had a child), Kathryn Pogson (as Andrea’s elder sister Pamela) and Jonathan Jaynes (as her younger brother David). Some of this casting is pointed: Pogson played the Andrea character in the original production of Brafferton Arbor; Costigan was Bob in the screen version of Rita, Sue and Bob, Too! (from which we see a single clip). Until a few weeks ago Monica Dolan wasn’t an actress I’d noticed before: since then I’ve seen her twice on television, as the stalker in the otherwise ropy U Be Dead then as the head teacher in the rather better Excluded. She’s very good here as the kindly Ann: it’s true that the real Ann’s voice is more lively and entertaining than most of the others’ but Dolan animates her with such empathetic skill that she becomes an almost tragic figure.
Another benefit of the lip-synching is that it helps you believe in the honesty of the witnesses in a way that’s often not possible in fly-on-the-wall documentary, where you wonder how much the people on screen are playing up for the benefit of the camera and self-publicity. Of course it’s possible that some of what is said here is untrue or exaggerated but I suspended disbelief almost entirely – again largely because what Dolan, Dudgeon et al were doing was unarguably truthful (that is to say, truthful acting). Nevertheless, there’s a stylistic indecisiveness at work here, which tends to undermine their excellence. Barnard doesn’t appear to make up her mind whether the lip-synched sequences are presented as a conventional documentary or as ‘found’ reality – that is, with the people shown not as if they were interrupting their normal lives for an interview but in more natural, everyday situations. For example, there’s a sequence in which the couple played by Dudgeon and Dolan describe the death of Lorraine’s infant son. Steve is sitting on a chair in the foreground, Ann on a settee in the background of the frame. They both get very upset; Steve eventually moves to sit with Ann and they take each other’s hand. According to documentary convention, the couple would have been sitting side by side from the start of the sequence. It’s fine to defy convention but pointless to replace it with something that looks more false than the convention: the physical separation of Ann and Steve and his movement towards her is too obviously designed to achieve a dramatic climax to the scene.
Matthew McNulty seems very right in his brief appearance as Andrea’s son. The two young actresses who play her daughters are less successful and it’s unfortunate that the main weakness in the cast is Manjinder Virk in the main part of Lorraine. (Christine Bottomley is the younger daughter Lisa.) The two things are clearly related: Virk’s limitations would be less obvious if she had less screen time. But she really isn’t good – especially once we realise that the interviews with Lorraine were recorded while she was in prison. Her appearance is too sleek for one thing (Lorraine tells us that she’s ‘really pretty’: Barnard seems to think we wouldn’t believe that if the actress playing her looked convincingly wasted). The larger problem is Virk’s overacting and the mobility of her facial expressions, which contradict the dead, exhausted tones of the real Lorraine. When she lists the attributes of a new boyfriend, Virk is gently smiling and hopeful – but the voice exposes her artificiality: we can already hear the truth that’s coming. (The boyfriend beat Lorraine up repeatedly.) There are a few odd bits of casting too. Danny Webb doubles up as Max Stafford-Clark and the drunken father of the family in Brafferton Arbor, although he does both well. Jimi Mistry, who plays the boyfriend in the reconstructed play, is evidently much older than Natalie Gavin, who plays the Andrea figure, but no one comments on this. You can’t tell whether that’s because the people are so racist that they notice only the colour of the boyfriend’s skin, or whether we’re supposed to accept Andrea and him as more or less the same age.
Perhaps the grimmest moment in The Arbor is when Lorraine recalls how, as a young child, she heard Andrea come home from the pub one night and tell the man she was with that she regretted having given birth to Lorraine because she couldn’t give the same love to a mixed race child that she gave to her two other kids by white fathers. (Both the other daughter and the son speak kindly of their mother and seem baffled why Lorraine’s life has gone so wrong and why she’s so resentful of their mother.) What intensifies the bleakness here isn’t Andrea’s admission so much as the way that it chimes with Lorraine’s having said at a previous point that she wishes she’d never been born. We know from very early on in the film that Lorraine hasn’t forgiven and can’t forgive her mother for the life she left her with. That limits the dramatic and documentary scope of what follows: and, once Andrea has died and Lorraine’s inheritance is the main focus of the narrative (the structure is basically that of a two-act play), we know it’s going to be largely a matter of describing how bad things get. Because the main interest of The Arbor lies in the way it’s put together, the question naturally arises of whether Clio Barnard is exploiting content for the sake of style – of whether, given the grimness of the content, this stylistic preoccupation is unseemly. The older generations of actors are good enough, however, to rise above that difficulty: Barnard has a lot to thank them for. And, as a documentarist, she makes some strong, sad points about the Buttershaw estate. To an observer, it looks to have been a gruesome place to live in the 1980s and not to have changed much since. Yet we hear the people who’ve lived their lives there regretting the loss of community spirit over the years – they’re genuinely (which probably is to say falsely) nostalgic for the brutal culture which Andrea Dunbar dramatised in her stage plays. The gloomy but supple music is by Harry Escott and Molly Nyman.
25 October 2010