I complained about the subtitles in “The Arbor” as soon as I saw them. I wrote off subtitles for an English language movie as one more obnoxious gimmick in an already experimental British documentary that from the start tests our understanding of what a documentary is.
But before long, I was glad to have them. There’s no substitution for this thick Yorkshire dialect in creating the most authentic version of this story, and they allowed me to hang on every word of this compelling and fascinating experiment in filmmaking.
“The Arbor” tells the life story of the playwright Andrea Dunbar, a woman who saw success on stage as young as the age of 15, but then gave birth to three children each from different fathers and died from a drug overdose at 29.
We hear it through the voices of her children, lovers, parents, neighbors and Andrea herself, but we see it through the eyes of actors. Clio Barnard has made a film that teeters the line between documentary and biographical fiction by casting actors to lip sync to the vocal testimonial of the actual subjects.
This gives Barnard the freedom to stage her actors in social tableaux settings as they deliver harrowing testimonial directly to the camera. It’s a unique cinematic style that is not only constantly visually stimulating but one that redefines the way a documentary could be filmed.
The vocal sync-ups by each performer are impeccable, and the faces of figures like the half-Pakistani Lorraine Dunbar (Manjinder Virk) and first child Lisa Thompson (Christine Bottomley) are mesmerizing. These performances are so powerful on all parts that we take the gimmick for granted before long. And as it gracefully diverts from Andrea’s life to the drug addiction and abuse of Lorraine, her story is emotionally devastating, gimmick or not.
Regardless of its aesthetics, “The Arbor” proves to be a story with poignant messages of family, race and drug addiction packaged in a theatrical visage. This is not merely a story of a woman’s wasted artistry. “The Arbor” gets at much deeper issues.
And yet the experiment is a curious one. My question is, is this approach really more artful than a generic documentary? Yes, staging is always an issue in documentaries, but there are many that use nothing but archival, cinema verite footage that are filled with visual, cinematic artistry.
At times the gimmick of “The Arbor” has it too many ways. Although this is hardly true of any dramatic narratives, there is here something phony about an actor rummaging through personal belongings or watching archival footage of the real Andrea Dunbar on TV when it seems transparent the real person never did such a thing. The film even gets meta when it talks about the play “A State Affair,” a sequel to Andrea’s first play 20 years later that used actors lip synching to testimony on stage.
Complaining about this gimmick would deny us the performance of Virk as Lorraine. Her story is truly the most harrowing, and without ever speaking a word of her own, Virk creates a remarkably immersive effect.
“The Arbor” may have made a great standard documentary because of its story, but Barnard makes it into a great film above all else.
3 ½ stars
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