Bird (dir. Andrea Arnold, 2024)

The British filmmaker Andrea Arnold is the most important living director of films that focus on female subjects. Fish Tank and American Honey (as well as her excellent documentary, Cow) solidified her status in that regard, and her latest film Bird re-confirms it. The movie is set in north Kent and traces the daily familial challenges and frustrations of Bailey (Nykiya Adams) and her father Bug (Barry Keoghan). Although it's loving, their relationship is also a somewhat fraught and trying one. Bug is about to get re-married, and Bailey refuses to try on the cat-suit that his new wife has had made for her and the other girls to wear at their wedding. Some trans vibes are strongly hinted at early in the film, yet it’s just as likely that Bailey just doesn’t want to be told what to do and resists any hint of authority. Instead, she wants to fit in with the tough guys and scally lads around her in their neighborhood, which Andrea Arnold has said she’s carefully crafted to resemble the one where she grew up in Dartford, on the far outskirts of London.

The film is a kind of escape into hardcore gritty realism and an escape from it at once. At a few points in the movie, Bailey and Bug race around town on a scooter, scenes in which we as viewers accelerate right along with the characters as a way of lifting them (and us) out of their hardscrabble circumstances to speed away from the social milieu and economic constraints that surround them. Arnold is adept at capturing the fleeting joys that continually counterbalance moments of desperation. For instance, during the chaos of Bug’s bachelor party, the guys in attendance break out into a resoundingly moving karaoke rendition of Coldplay’s “Yellow.” Arnold lets these guys suddenly swoon us into noticing how sweet their world is, or how sweet it can be. What Bailey is up against also has the power to save her, individually and communally, rather than weighing her down, if she allows herself to feel it.

Bailey’s main encounter in the film is with Bird (Franz Rogowski), whom it’s best to let exist within the world of the film rather than describing him too much here. He grew up where Bailey lives and has returned there to seek out his father, whom he hasn’t seen in many years. Bird’s presence in the film bears far more importance as the movie builds towards its heart-stopping climax, a scene that powerfully entwines the themes of domestic violence and masculine entitlement. Bird is tasked with extracting Bailey and her siblings from that terrible fate, which is all executed through the device of brilliantly conceived and perfectly calibrated magical realism, in several central minutes that Arnold has shaped to linger with her audience, both at the moment of viewing them and long afterwards, in a sequence that’s among the very best of its kind in cinema.

There’s a long stretch in the middle of Bird when I missed feeling Arnold’s sure directorial hand. For perhaps nearly half an hour, Bailey’s journey felt too unmoored and drifted aimlessly about (unless I was just letting myself get too distracted on Grindr as I was sitting there, though I don’t think so since my tuning it out a bit felt propelled by the jump-cut wanderings up on the screen). While reflecting back on it, I realized that the movie probably should have been just an hour long as an ideal length, rather than the 90+ minutes that a studio or distributor no doubt required. An hour-long film would have neatly accentuated the fairytale-like quality of Arnold’s movie, and it’s important to say that an hour-long film is also perfectly fine. Not everything has to be a sheerly capitalist endeavor, nor should Arnold’s movie be forced to be. Rather, it should be allowed to explore in its own ways its deeper and quite meaningful questions. How can we be rescued? Who might appear out of nowhere to rescue us? Where did they come from? Where will they go?

 

Bird is currently screening at the awesome Portland Museum of Art in downtown Portland, Maine.