The Arbor

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Audience Member Innovative and brilliantly done. The actors lip-synching were excellent. It's not a happy tale but very moving and sad. It's the real sequel to Rita, Sue and Bob too you could say. Rated 5/5 Stars •  Rated 5 out of 5 stars 02/19/23 Full Review Audience Member I was interested to see what would be the effect of actors lip-syncing to real interviews. The answer? Not that much really. Not sure the film-makers used the technique to its full potential, so you still felt like an unalloyed voyeur on misery. The excerpts from the plays, performed on the estate with everyone watching, were very effective though. Rated 3/5 Stars •  Rated 3 out of 5 stars 02/19/23 Full Review Audience Member Interesting, though it does border on prevention from time to time. Rated 3/5 Stars •  Rated 3 out of 5 stars 01/29/23 Full Review Audience Member The Arbor is a emi-documentary with lip-syncing actors over real voices, scenes played out on a council estate, and news clips about the life and times of Andrea Dunbar, a "genius from the slums" and author of THE ARBOR and RITA, SUE & BOB TOO. She wrote her first play, which was performed at the Royal Court Theatre London, when she was just 15, and she died at 29 in the local pub, leaving behind three children from three diferent different fathers to grow up as best they coucld (and in the case of one, this was not very well at all.) Unusal, compelling, tragic, depressing, tedious, and not for everyone, but very interesting. Rated 3.5/5 Stars •  Rated 3.5 out of 5 stars 02/16/23 Full Review Audience Member I had never heard of Andrea Dunbar, the playwright and subject of The Arbor, before watching this film. Dunbar's own tragic life was one that saw her gain recognition for her art early in her writing career, and then struggle with heavy alcohol use and violence until her eventual death. She wrote three plays before she died, the first of which the film takes its title from. But director Clio Barnard's interest in Dunbar's story is not in her career, at least, not on the surface, but on her relationships with her children. And that story is a devastatingly sad account of a cycle of parental neglect. Barnard focuses on the relationship between Dunbar and her eldest daughter, Lorraine, who was only ten when Dunbar died at the age of 29. The film explores specifically the similarities between the two women's lives, and more generally, the cyclical nature of family violence and addiction. For that alone it is a fascinating and insightful film, if often tough to stomach. But one can't talk about this psuedo-documentary without commenting on the style. Barnard's interesting experiment involves shooting actors lip-syncing to the narrations of documentary interviews with Dunbar's family and community. Some may find the exercise distracting, or feel that it takes away from the subject matter, but given that the subject of the film was a playwright, it gives the entire execution a sort of metafilmic quality in that Dunbar's life is effectively turned into a play inside this documentary. Rated 4/5 Stars •  Rated 4 out of 5 stars 02/27/23 Full Review Audience Member Not the kind of thing you'd expect from the image sensitive UK. I would not have enjoyed it in the theater as a lot of the dialog is completely unintelligible, but at home on a DVD you can stop and read the subtitles if you have to. The people it depicts are easily as hopeless as any you've seen in the US, if not more so. As a former teacher I was relieved to see how some of my own worst students weren't without precedent. It will definitely illuminate what it means to live in one of the UK's estates. Rated 3.5/5 Stars •  Rated 3.5 out of 5 stars 01/31/23 Full Review Read all reviews

The Arbor

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