Cast: Manjinder Virk, Neil Dudgeon, Monica Dolan
Undoubtedly the most over-hyped and over-celebrated films of the festival; one can only assume that it was our desperation to laud a British filmmaker that allowed this hollow, meandering husk of a film to garner such critical praise. The admittedly pioneering approach to documentary filmmaking takes as its subject the equally over-hyped alcoholic playwright and ‘Paul Abbot-precursor’ Andrea Dunbar. The film takes real interview recordings with Dunbar’s children and brings them to life using lip-synching technology and a number of specially trained actors. The film also cuts in scenes from Dunbar’s first play (from which the film takes its name) that are filmed on the street where Dunbar lived as a child.
This could have been a superb one-hour TV documentary – and would have been deserving of praise in that form – but the pointless attempt to string it out into a cinematic feature have forced the filmmakers to search for subject matter that just isn’t there. All the expensive equipment and talented cameramen in the world cannot mask the fact that Andrew Dunbar is not interesting enough to be the subject of a feature film; and eventually the filmmakers reluctantly bow to this inevitability and turn to her troubled daughter, Lorraine, instead. Unfortunately, Lorraine is just a self-obsessed crackhead who hates her mum and accidentally killed her own child. They are a dime-a-dozen in the Western world, and the decision to take advantage of her predicament is cheap and constitutes exploitative and insincere filmmaking of the highest order.
The only possible justification for this segway is the idea that the film constitutes the play Dunbar would have written if she were still alive today. In Robin Soans’ play ‘A State Affair’ (2000) – in which he revisits Dunbar’s life and surroundings – there is a monologue of Lorraine explaining that if ‘Rita, Sue, and Bob Too’ (Dunbar’s most famous play) had been written in 2000, it would have been about smackheads instead of drunks. Perhaps Barnard is suggesting that, with the continuing collapse of our nation, in 2010 Dunbar would have written about women who are addicted to crack cocaine and get imprisoned by abusive partners and accidentally kill their own infant children with methadone overdoses.
Undoubtedly the most over-hyped and over-celebrated films of the festival; one can only assume that it was our desperation to laud a British filmmaker that allowed this hollow, meandering husk of a film to garner such critical praise. The admittedly pioneering approach to documentary filmmaking takes as its subject the equally over-hyped alcoholic playwright and ‘Paul Abbot-precursor’ Andrea Dunbar. The film takes real interview recordings with Dunbar’s children and brings them to life using lip-synching technology and a number of specially trained actors. The film also cuts in scenes from Dunbar’s first play (from which the film takes its name) that are filmed on the street where Dunbar lived as a child.
This could have been a superb one-hour TV documentary – and would have been deserving of praise in that form – but the pointless attempt to string it out into a cinematic feature have forced the filmmakers to search for subject matter that just isn’t there. All the expensive equipment and talented cameramen in the world cannot mask the fact that Andrew Dunbar is not interesting enough to be the subject of a feature film; and eventually the filmmakers reluctantly bow to this inevitability and turn to her troubled daughter, Lorraine, instead. Unfortunately, Lorraine is just a self-obsessed crackhead who hates her mum and accidentally killed her own child. They are a dime-a-dozen in the Western world, and the decision to take advantage of her predicament is cheap and constitutes exploitative and insincere filmmaking of the highest order.
The only possible justification for this segway is the idea that the film constitutes the play Dunbar would have written if she were still alive today. In Robin Soans’ play ‘A State Affair’ (2000) – in which he revisits Dunbar’s life and surroundings – there is a monologue of Lorraine explaining that if ‘Rita, Sue, and Bob Too’ (Dunbar’s most famous play) had been written in 2000, it would have been about smackheads instead of drunks. Perhaps Barnard is suggesting that, with the continuing collapse of our nation, in 2010 Dunbar would have written about women who are addicted to crack cocaine and get imprisoned by abusive partners and accidentally kill their own infant children with methadone overdoses.
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