The Arbor

dir. Clio Bernard
starring. Manjinder Virk, Christine Bottomley, Danny Webb

It's difficult to label The Arbor with any kind of genre classification, which for me is a good thing. I usually think classifications are for things that are beyond my small realm of comprehension, like science and fine art and food groups. In that vein, The Arbor would be something like a tomato, or some weird fruit/veg/meat hybrid that's been created in a lab in Sweden. It's a docu-drama disguised as performance art wearing the cloak of a biopic. Or maybe its none of those things. Let me try that again. The Arbor is a film about the life of a playwright who wrote plays about her life with actors acting out the plays about her life with other actors acting out interviews about her life and her families' lives. Got it?

Once you manage to sort all that out, you'll find yourself following the tragic story of Bradford playwright Andrea Dunbar (who passed away in 1990) and her family, in particular her troubled daughter Lorraine (Manjinder Virk). It's heartwarming themes include drug abuse, alcoholism, prostitution, and domestic abuse of every kind. Selections of Dunbars' plays (Rita, Sue, and Bob Too being her most well known) are performed by actors outside of Dunbar's home in Bradford and appear to be so autobiographical its practically cheating. Despite myself not having any real familiarity with Dunbar's plays before seeing The Arbor, if they are in whole like the bits in the film, I pretty much get the idea. People yell at each other, then other people yell at each other, and then more people yell at each other. It's like my family plugged into an amplifier and turned up to 11. Thankfully that makes up only a portion of the film, the majority of which consists of audio interviews with the living members of Dunbar's family, which are performed via lip-sync by actors.

The Arbor is quite fascinating once you get past the Milli-Vanilli moments. The performances of the lip-syncing actors are truly amazing considering the time and preparation that must have gone into the achievement. Although I found the technique distracting at first, the stories they tell are so dramatically engaging I soon forgot they were actors. The film is innovative in the way it weaves performance with reality (as Dunbar's plays presumably did) which adds a compelling new layer to what otherwise could have been just another documentary. And despite the film being messy at times, director Clio Bernard, shows a strong understanding of how to delicately unfold a captivating story.

But be aware that The Arbor is no walk in the park... unless it's a really sad park and you're taking the walk at night and the only other people in the park are smack heads and homeless people. It's hard for me to claim that I actually enjoyed the film. I experienced it and I felt it and then I went home and called my mom to tell her that I love her. So, if you're willing to step into some depressing waters for the sake of catching an engrossing flick that takes documentary film making in a new and creative direction, it's definitely worth the heartache.