On a street called "the Arbor" in a British housing development named Bradford Estates, Yorkshire, a young girl named Andrea Dunbar grew up in the 1970's and 80's, amid a life of poverty, family drunkenness, promiscuity, racism and abuse. At the age of fifteen she wrote a play called "The Arbor" which truthfully depicted what she knew firsthand. It was successfully staged - a couple of more were written - all in the local vernacular and touching on the same topics; one of the plays (Rita, Sue and Bob Too) was made into a film, and then, a few years later, the young playwright was dead - probably of a brain aneurism. She left behind three children, from three different fathers, the oldest of whom, Lorraine, was half Pakistani, which in the Dunbar neighborhood was a scandal.
Lorraine herself was a lovely girl, but her young life was a descending spiral of abuse, drug addiction, prostitution, and finally conviction for manslaughter for the death of her two year old son, Harris, who consumed a lethal dose of methadone one night and never woke up from a very deep sleep in the arms of his mother.
Now documentary filmmaker Clio Barnard has taken this material and produced a film of great impact, employing a controversial and innovative technique. Using hours of recorded interviews with members of the families of Lorraine and her late mother, she has actors portraying them in various stages of their lives, and in some of the original locales, but rather than speaking, the actors lip-synch to the actual voices of the interviewees. The effect is haunting, because the voices provide an intimate connection to the people involved, yet the various scenes look formally staged and sometimes theatrical. The lower-class accents are in some cases indecipherable and the manner of speaking is a kind of devolved English - for instance articles are frequently dropped and there is some slang and common profanity. But subtitles are provided and the words are never too difficult to follow.
Solemnly paced and at first seeming very disjointed, it doesn't take long to figure out the various family members and their relationships. We take their truthfulness for granted, even though, as happens in the case of multiple eyewitnesses, the facts don't always match up. With the accumulated detail of lives that seem destined for either chaos or disintegration, what results is very much like the pathos of Greek tragedy. Speaking from our personal viewpoint, the principal truth that we receive from "The Arbor" is this: that the sins of the father (or in this case, the mother) inevitably impact the lives of their children, and that sadness and hopelessness is pervasive in a milieu of poverty, lack of self-respect, free sex and frequent abortion, alcohol and drug abuse, and lack of consideration for human worth. Some might say it's insignificant that God, or religion, are never mentioned by any of the people involved, but for us, the absence of that spirituality is glaring. Indeed, in a society so terribly off-kilter, one has to wonder why?
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