His and Hers

Dir. Ken Wardrop

With Mother's Day almost around the corner (don't panic, you've got a few weeks left) and International Women's Day upon us, what better way to treat that special lady in your life than to take her to a film that celebrates all that she is? I give you His and Hers, a charming documentary that features anecdotes from 70 different Irish women of all different ages and stages in life, and focuses on their relationships with the opposite sex. It does so with grace, tenderness, poise, and sense of humor, attempting to portray just what it means to be a woman today.

The film begins with a lovely sequence that moves from an infant girl to a baby learning to crawl, to a tot taking a few tentative steps, to a toddler racing through the house, finally settling in on a chatty youngster to begin its stories. It continues this way with each girl a bit further along in life than the one before her, in order to span the entire lifetime of the 'typical' modern woman. Each woman is different, but they are made equal by the focusing of their stories on their relationships with the men in their lives. The child talks about pleasing her dad. The young teen giggles while texting a boy who seeks her affections. A twenty-something discusses waiting for her boyfriend to propose. Eventually it features newlyweds, new mothers, older mothers, and on and on through to several women who have out lived their spouses and find themselves possibly for the first time in their lives, without a man.

It is a simple premise carried out almost to perfection by director Ken Wardrop. Each woman is beautifully framed somewhere in her home, often in the midst of performing an everyday task like picking up after her teenage son or changing the sheets. Each shot is carefully composed, often through a doorway or in front of a window with a long depth of focus giving it many layers, perhaps to symbolize the many layers of the women on screen. These women are approached with an obvious affection and it makes sense that Wardrop made the film in honor of his own mother. Because of this, his subjects are at ease in front of the camera, creating very genuine and poignant moments. Structurally the film doesn't follow a traditional story arc at all, but the women featured are entertaining enough in their own right to hold interest, and the superb editing ensures that the film never drags on.

Unfortunately, the film by its nature did portray women as rather dependent on the men in their lives. It seems implied that all of these women's lives follow the same kind of trajectory: childhood, motherhood, old age, death. Careers were rarely if ever mentioned and there are no women featured who grew up to do anything other than raise a family. I'm no raging feminist but, by only showing them in the home it feels as if that is their place and their purpose, although I don't suppose this was the filmmaker's intention. For many woman, this is the path their lives take and they are quite happy to fulfill it. For them, the film holds true. It just seems a bit a variety would have been better representative of the majority of women in this day and age.

Nonetheless the film was rather heartwarming and being of the represented gender I did find it relatable. However, whichever gender you identify with, you're bound to know someone with whom this film will resonate (unless the only women you know are die hard feminists). So, share 'His and Hers' with your wife, mum, daughter, girlfriend, grandmother, sister, aunt, in-law, best friend...This film is best enjoyed together.

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.