The itchy, rhythmic funk of the incomparable '80s post-punk band The Au Pairs underscores the British docudrama The Arbor. Deliberately chosen for leader Lesley Woods' feminist-lyrical analysis of sex and politics, the music is part of director Clio Barnard's strategy to revive the sociological scrutiny of '80s pop culture that forms the basis of her film. But then Barnard strips Woods' insinuating vocals (critic Greil Marcus had praised her sound as "acrid," although "tart" better describes Woods' ironicerotic tease). This is probably so as not to compete with Barnard's own screenplay rhetoric. Yet, the Au Pairs' beat provides tension that Barnard's uninspired images and dialogue lack.
Great as The Au Pairs' music still is, that's one strategy too many for Barnard's almost-Byzantine project. The Arbor overcomplicates the tragic life of Andrea Dunbar, resident at the Brafferton Arbor housing project (called "an estate" in England) who, at age 20, wrote a play about her grim neighborhood that was produced as the 1986 film titled Rita, Sue and Bob Too. It was a blunt, funny-acrid- view of Thatcher-era miserablism, adroitly directed by Alan Clarke, but its success did not prevent young Dunbar's seemingly inevitable decline: a three-time unwed mother, she quickly became an alcoholic and died at age 29.
The Arbor adds the next generation's story through Dunbar's three children as they were shuttled among family and foster parents. In particular, Dunbar's bi-racial eldest daughter, Lorraine, is scrutinized as she follows a recognizable hard luck path: drugs, prostitution and a probably accidental infanticide. Surprisingly, Barnard ignores the example of Shelagh Delaney, a 1950s British teen whose youthful play, A Taste of Honey, about a white working-class girl's romance with a fellow outcast black sailor virtually foretold Dunbar's circumstances. Barnard prefers to present Dunbar's family catastrophe as if outlining preordained feminist tragedy. It is broken up into grabbag scenes from Dunbar's plays, journals and letters by Lorraine and the two other children, Lisa and Steve, along with interviews with relatives and neighbors.
Barnard rejects standard documentary talking heads to film it all as theatrical recitation. Professional actors lip-sync authentic documentary interviews, memories are stylized as visual art and scenes from Dunbar's play are performed outdoors on the grounds of Brafferton Arbor (this is where The Au Pairs' "Kerb Crawler" is first heard). It's as if Barnard intends to bring art back to the streets-to the people-but her artistic affectations have the opposite effect.
When The Au Pairs triumphantly applied post-punk's political agit-prop to pop culture (along with such avantpop groups as Scritti Politti, Wire, Gang of Four, X-Ray Spex, The Slits and The Raincoats), they created theory you could dance to. But Barnard mixes documentary, drama and visual poetics into something British theater impresario Max Stafford-Clark calls "a verbatim play." This theatrical-sociological hybrid isn't a Brechtian distancing device, but it epitomizes class estrangement. Instead of bringing deeper understanding and empathy to the masses, the lives of Dunbar's family are made into prurient spectacle. Not out of agitated post-punk fervor, just for bourgeois delectation.
"It's not very flattering is it?" a foster parent says after viewing a TV report about Lorraine, the unfortunate child he and his wife helped to raise. Not flattering to the subject itself, or the people actually involved, but very flattering indeed for the media folk whose livelihood, sense of well-being and feelings of social and moral superiority depend on morbid depictions of the lower classes. Lorraine's tragedy is like a white Precious; it rivals Dunbar's rotten legacy. That the media class hides behind this dubious sense of altruistic mission is The Arbor's real-if unintended-lesson.
Bright, shiny actresses hired to portray Dunbar's offspring are an offense to our sense of reality-and to the harsh truth that Alan Clarke preserved in Rita, Sue and Bob Too. Clarke was part of the realist movement spawn by Ken Loach, Mike Leigh and continued today by Shane Meadows. Responding to contemporary social conditions, these artists dealt with poverty and its effect through the British documentary tradition and BBC social realism- which, ironically, peaked under Thatcher.
But you can't blame Thatcher that The Arbor feels distanced from that golden era of British pop music, television and cinema. It's very much part of what's become an ongoing media sub-industry- helpfully dubbed "Poverty Porn." The Arbor's artsiness exposes Poverty Porn's origin by its sensationalized emphasis on the degeneration of Dunbar family and ilk. When Barnard inserts actual footage of Dunbar's father, the toothless illiterate resembles Christian Bale's Dicky in The
Fighter-but without David O. Russell's sensitivity to the way media tends to distort the deprivations of underclass life. Remember how the real and formidable Dicky Ward takes over for histrionic Bale? Well, The Arbor suggests The Fighter in reverse.
Seeing Dunbar's wizened father wearing the pompadour of his youth suggests a pop culture phenomenon at odds with Barnard's cinema artifice. The undying spirit of youth still apparent in that defiant quiff does not inform Barnard's thesis. She buries it in devices like having an actor announce "Act 2, scene 6"-even though underneath you can hear the insolent intro to The Au Pairs' magnificent, unnerving and unforgettable "Diet" ("He works the car/ She the sink/ She's not here to think.") Yet in Morrissey's recent British workingclass tracks "Slum Mums" and "Teenage Dad on His Estate," the complexities of contemporary gender and economic struggle on the estates are made vivid and intimate beyond Barnard's artifices.
Barnard's post-documentary strategy lacks such helpful inquiring details as whether Dunbar preferred The Au Pairs or Bananarama among her contemporaries. Misrepresenting the urgency of '80s pop music and making realism conform to the craftiness of theater is not a fitting epitaph for Dunbar or her folk. As Lorraine's foster father complains about an exploitative news broadcast, Barnard's attempt at agitprop "embroiders it a bit." She corrupts Loach, Leigh, Meadows-and Lesley Woods'-noble efforts.
>>>The Arbor
Directed by Clio Barnard
April 27-May 10 at Film Forum Runtime: 94 min.
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