Misfortunes of Imaginary Beings: 11/03/20

A blog formerly known as Bookishness / By Charles Matthews

"Dazzled by so many and such marvelous inventions, the people of Macondo ... became indignant over the living images that the prosperous merchant Bruno Crespi projected in the theater with the lion-head ticket windows, for a character who had died and was buried in one film and for whose misfortune tears had been shed would reappear alive and transformed into an Arab in the next one. The audience, who had paid two cents apiece to share the difficulties of the actors, would not tolerate that outlandish fraud and they broke up the seats. The mayor, at the urging of Bruno Crespi, explained in a proclamation that the cinema was a machine of illusions that did not merit the emotional outbursts of the audience. With that discouraging explanation many ... decided not to return to the movies, considering that they already had too many troubles of their own to weep over the acted-out misfortunes of imaginary beings."
--Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

Tuesday, November 3, 2020

The Arbor (Clio Barnard, 2010)

Manjinder Virk in The Arbor

Cast: Manjinder Virk, Christine Bottomley, Natalie Gavin, Parvani Lingiah, Danny Webb, Kate Rutter, Jimi Mistry, Robert Emms, Kathryn Pogson, George Costigan, Monica Dolan, Neil Dudgeon, Matthew McNulty, Lizzie Roper. Screenplay: Clio Barnard. Cinematography: Ole Bratt Birkeland. Production design: Matthew Button. Film editing: Nick Fenton, Daniel Goddard. Music: Harry Escott, Molly Nyman.

The Arbor is a heartfelt, scathing docudrama about promise without fulfillment, centered on the playwright Andrea Dunbar and her children, particularly the eldest, Lorraine, who is played on screen by the actress Manjinder Virk, lip-synching the actual Lorraine's voice from recorded interviews. Director Clio Barnard uses this technique throughout the film, with the voices of Lorraine's siblings, her foster parents, and other members of the Dunbar family dubbed in place of the voices of the on-screen actors. It's an arresting device that runs the risk of having a film full of monologues, which Barnard avoids by staging the scenes in the actual locations, particularly the drab, run-down council estate (i.e. "public housing"), where the Dunbars lived. She also includes scenes from Dunbar's plays, and the film, Rita, Sue and Bob Too (Alan Clarke, 1987), that was made from one of them. The Arbor culminates in the story of Lorraine's descent into drug addiction and the consequent death of her small son. It's not a film designed to lift your spirits, but the effectiveness of Barnard's way of telling the story makes it well worth seeing.