The Arbor was an unprecedented film. At first it looked like a documentary about Andrea Dunbar, a young woman who escaped Bradford to write plays for London. She flourished briefly but Bradford and booze called her back, and she was dead of a brain hemorrhage after a night at the pub when she was only twenty-nine. She had had three children by three different men, and much of The Arbor consists of sound interviews with them and other people who knew Andrea, with the words being lip-synched by actors. I know, this seems too odd for its own good—but The Arbor is not just innovative, it is also unbearably touching, and one of those films that kicks the art of film forward. The ancient orthodoxy that sound and picture must always be married is now as broken and dubious as marriage itself.

The Selfish Giant is more restrained formally, but I think it is the better of the two films. Clio Barnard (who teaches at the University of Kent) admits to the influence of Ken Loach, and often in this new film I was reminded of Vittorio De Sica’s Shoeshine (1946), another movie about wayward boys—and one of them is crazy for horses. It was a keynote of Italian neorealist films like Shoeshine that they used non-professional actors and made them seem essential. One fascinating tension in The Selfish Giant is that, just as the busy subtitling is a creative intervention, and a concession to being acceptable, so in the film itself it is impossible to detect acting or even any mediating effort to make the story sentimental or comfortable. So many films these days boast of being based on fact, when we know that they are fake from the first frame. But Clio Barnard does little else but thrust us into life itself and the remoteness of caring in these boys’ lives.





The Wilde story concerns a Giant who owns a beautiful garden where children play in his absence. But when he comes back from a trip he decides that the garden is his alone, and so he bans the children. The problem is that without them the garden withers. As I said, Kitten (Sean Gilder), a small-time racketeer in stolen scrap and a patron of sulky races, is a version of this Wildean Giant, although he discovers a tiny way in which he can be a friend to the boys. You could argue that Britain itself is the real Giant and the true villain, in taking the landscape and the former prosperity of Yorkshire and turning it into a wasteland.

Barnard is not as overtly politicized as Ken Loach, and there is no question that the textile industry in Bradford declined as it became possible and then essential to have clothes made far more cheaply in parts of the world where exploitation was more complete. But in the age of Margaret Thatcher, there was a campaign against the North (much of which traditionally voted Labor) and against the last old industry, coal-mining, and today there is a state of impoverished neglect in some of the best rural parts of Britain that amounts to official indifference. The beauties in the English landscape are a treasury, but viewers in this country should be wary of believing that everything looks like Downton Abbey or Brideshead. There are stately buildings in Bradford, to be sure. But Clio Barnard shows us the parts no tourist would be encouraged to visit. It is her genius that she can see poetry in this desolation just as she can tell us so much about people and their ties by looking at their hands.

The Arbor came to America; it had several fine reviews and it won the award for best new documentarian at the Tribeca Film Festival—though it was inadequate to regard the film as a documentary. The Selfish Giant is neither comfortable nor encouraging, especially if you are inclined to take an idyllic view of Britain. But after two piercing films it is clear that Clio Barnard (who was actually born in America) is one of the best young directors around. Time and again, one has the depressing feeling that directors in America nowadays are making movies about old movies and behavior known from the screen. It’s as if the film-makers have never had life experience, or are no longer taught to trust it. Nothing is more threatening to the vitality of the cinema. The Selfish Giant has an austere spiritual certainty that to evade or avoid life is sacrilegious.