Underclass Fates

L. Quart: Underclass Fates

THERE SEEM to have been almost as many British films in the last couple of decades that deal with the underclass as those that depict working-class life. Though the boundaries between the groups are fluid, many films take up one or the other as a subject. Films ranging from Lindsay Anderson’s This Sporting Life (1963)—which centered on the doomed relationship of two extremely neurotic working-class characters—to Nigel Cole’s more commercial Made in Dagenham (2010) depict a class ethos of strong communal and familial bonds, and a culture rooted in work. British films on the underclass present an anomic world of fatherlessness, violence, crime, and permanent unemployment: Lynne Ramsay’s Ratcatcher (1999); Shane Meadows’ This Is England (2006); Andrea Arnold’s Fish Tank (2009); and actor Gary Oldman’s powerful first film, Nil by Mouth (1997).

Oldman’s film centers on a self-destructive family inhabiting a white neighborhood in South London, a dysfunctional world where almost everybody is permanently unemployed and lives on the dole. Many of the men there have spent much of their lives in prison. The film gives no political or social explanations for their situation, but treats their unredeemable lives as a result of their own behavior. Oldman’s look at their lives is so unsparing and penetrating that nothing more seems necessary.

Clio Barnard’s new film The Arbor is as relentlessly agonizing, unsentimental, and authentic a look at underclass lives as Nil by Mouth. It deals with the lives of Andrea Dunbar, the late Bradford (Yorkshire) playwright whose first work was also called The Arbor, and her eldest daughter Lorraine, one of three children she had with different fathers.

Instead of Nil by Mouth’s straightforward naturalistic drama, Barnard uses more intricate and experimental techniques. Andrea and Lorraine’s lives are reconstructed from a couple of TV documentaries about Andrea; extracts from a performance of the play The Arbor done on the council estate (a form of low-income public housing in the United Kingdom) she lived in, with its residents in the audience; and a group of actors lip-synching to tape-recordings of Lorraine, other Dunbar family members, and friends, taken from interviews that Barnard spent two years conducting. The result is a complex hybrid of fact and fiction, which despite the emotionally charged material avoids manipulating the audience’s sentiments. In fact, Barnard’s various formal strategies somewhat distance the film from the characters’ lives.

At age fifteen, Andrea, who had never been out of Yorkshire or inside a theater, wrote The Arbor as a school assignment. It depicted her experience as a pregnant teenager with an abusive, drunken father. All her work dealt with the world she knew firsthand. Her teacher encouraged her to develop the play so it could be performed theatrically. Directed by Max Stafford Clark, it eventually had a successful run at London’s Royal Court Theater, and was later performed off-off Broadway in New York at La MaMa. Andrea would write two other plays—one was made into a film—but, lacking the drive to leave, she stayed in her neighborhood the rest of her life. She died of a brain hemorrhage in 1990 at twenty-nine, after years of alcohol abuse, when Lorraine was only ten.

Lorraine is half-Pakistani. In the all-white, drug-infested council estate where she lived as a child, she was subject to racist slurs and treated as an outcast. But the film doesn’t view that fact as sufficient explanation for Lorraine’s becoming a petty thief and drug addict who services men to pay for her habit. Along the way she, just like her mother, has three children with three different feckless men who brutalize her. The authorities’ take two of Lorraine’s children away. The other dies tragically in her care (by consuming her methadone), and she is imprisoned for manslaughter. Lorraine (Manjinder Virk) addresses the camera directly, expressing rage toward her mother for taking her to pubs as a child and generally abusing and neglecting her.

The film makes clear that Lorraine, despite being articulate and relatively self-aware, has repeated her mother’s downward spiral, descending, in her words, into “a deep black hole.” (In that hole, Lorraine sees even prison as an escape.) She never displays a sign of Andrea’s talent, but one senses that like her mother she has a great deal of potential–which, in Lorraine’s case, will likely never be realized.

Lorraine’s memories of Andrea are not echoed by her mother’s younger daughter Lisa (Christine Bottomley). Lisa is more sympathetic to her mother; she doesn’t see Andrea as a monster. But it’s Lorraine, not Lisa, who is most scarred by Andrea. After leaving prison, Lorraine speaks of trying to stop being angry and resentful, but it’s hard to imagine that change is possible.

Barnard has made a moving film. However, her use of actors lip-synching directly to the camera can become static, and at times the litany of hopelessness seems unending. Also, the actress playing Lorraine looks too sweet and psychically intact to have lived as volatile and tragic a life as she did. Still, Lorraine’s pain feels genuine and comes through with a powerful intensity.

The Arbor, like Nil by Mouth, is not much interested in the larger social context of the individuals it portrays. The Buttershaw estate, where much of it takes place, has a relatively undamaged if not aesthetically pleasing surface. But according to its residents, their sense of community has eroded over the years. (The film mentions but never explores that subject.) The presence of people in the film like Lorraine’s foster parents, who live responsible, caring lives, suggests that other options than a life of desperation do exist.

Nevertheless, it’s clear that the estate is dominated by an underclass that’s often unemployed and, especially among its young members, given to a variety of self-destructive behaviors. It’s difficult to gauge how large that underclass is in contemporary Britain, but with the decline of coal, steel, and manufacturing, the breakdown of familial and class bonds, and the dilution of the social safety net, it has certainly grown. Barnard is not primarily interested in exploring the social, cultural, and political roots of the lives on screen. Her film’s impact lies not in an illumination of social forces, but in its evocation of the complex respective fates of Andrea and Lorraine.

Leonard Quart is the coauthor of the fourth edition of American Film and Society Since 1945 and is a contributing editor of Cineaste.