BIRD
(Check our Chris Reed’s Bird movie review. It hits theaters in NYC Friday, November 8 before expanding after that. Seen it? Join the conversation with HtN on our Letterboxd Page.)
British director Andrea Arnold (Cow) has long explored the ins and outs of working-class life, including in her Oscar-winning 2003 short Wasp and the Cannes Jury Prize-winning 2009 feature Fish Tank. In her new movie, Bird, she finds herself right back where she started: on a council estate in England’s Kent county. Though the poverty of the central characters leads to some challenging content, Arnold fills the screen with beauty and hope, adding a little supernatural fantasy for good measure. It’s not a perfect mix, but proves frequently lyrical and mesmerizing.
12-year-old Bailey (newcomer Nykiya Adams) lives with her father, Bug (Barry Keoghan, The Banshees of Inisherin), and older half-brother, Hunter (Jason Buda), in a messy apartment in a rundown building. Bailey passes the time by recording the world around her in artfully composed videos on her smartphone, with a particular eye for the natural world, especially birds. Content to mostly keep to herself, she is nevertheless drawn to Hunter’s activities with his friends, which include breaking into houses to attack and maim local wrongdoers who have otherwise escaped justice.
When Bug announces that he is marrying his girlfriend, Kayleigh (Frankie Box, Perfect 10), and that Bailey—who otherwise prefers t-shirts, pants and shorts—will have to wear a bridesmaid’s dress and do her hair up, his daughter instantly rebels, announcing that she refuses to participate. Bug’s near-violent reaction and subsequent self-obsessed behavior and drinking showcases his seeming inappropriateness as a parent. He will nevertheless reveal himself more qualified later, one of the joyful surprises of the narrative. There are many more.
After a night sleeping in a local field, Bailey wakes to find a stranger dancing nearby. This is the titular Bird (Franz Rogowski, Undine), who wears a dress, speaks with a foreign accent, and is apparently looking for his parents, who abandoned him as a child. He vaguely remembers where he grew up, so Bailey directs him there. It’s the building next to hers, on top of which he mounts a vigil, catching a view that, he hopes, will provide clues to his existence.
Despite their age difference (he’s easily in his thirties), Bailey and Bird begin to hang out. In many ways, Bailey is the wiser of the two, hardened by a life that includes an addict mother whose violent boyfriend constantly threatens to kill her and her younger children. Bird has the manner of a true innocent, what Russians call a “yurodivy,” or holy fool. There is a gentleness within him that attracts Bailey and makes her want to help him. Soon, perhaps, he will return the favor. His main gift to her, though, will be faith in the future.
Shooting on 16mm film and using handheld cameras, Arnold and her cinematographer, Robbie Ryan (Poor Things) craft evocative images that mirror those of Bailey’s own personal artwork. There’s a yearning for escape that exists side by side with a desire to remain grounded in one’s own universe that is perfectly captured by the push and pull of the intimate frame. Using Adams’ magnificent turn as a launching pad for this heartfelt coming-of-age drama, Arnold immerses us in a palpable specificity of place.
Which makes the turn towards the fanciful at the end all the more remarkable. Bird may not entirely make logical sense, but it earns the right to veer off course through otherwise strong writing and committed performances, coupled with visual foreshadowing of what is to come. I’m not entirely sold, but I was nevertheless transfixed.
– Christopher Llewellyn Reed (@ChrisReedFilm)
Mubi; Andrea Arnold; Bird
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