BIRD (Andrea Arnold 2024)

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BARRY KEOGHAN AND NYKIYA ADAMS IN BIRD

ANDREA ARNOLD: BIRD : (2024)

Order in disorder in the wilds of northern Kent

Andrea Arnold creates a chaotic world of multiple bad, too-young parents where we follow a 12-year-old girl called Bailey (newcomer Nykiya Adams) as she roams between her irresponsible, unreliable mum and dad. She is mainly around her father, Bug (Barry Keoghan, covered in tattoos of insects and having the time of his life), who was 14 when he fathered her, and Peyton (Jasmine Jobson), who is in a squat accross "town" in bed with Skate (James Nelson-Joyce), a horrible, threatening creature. Bailey is having her first period and, in negotiating all this discorder, this is a coming of age for her.

At first Arnold creates a sense of pulsating life that is exhilerating. But all is not right. Indeed the director declared when receiving the Golden Carriage award at Cannes Directors' Fortnight that she had exceptional troble transferring her words to screen this time.After a while, forward action stalls a bit. Additioally, the presence of an attention-getting Barry Keoghan as well as European flavor-of-the-month star Franz Rogowski (Transit, Undine, Lubo, Disco Boy) as the etherial, semi-magical titular Bird feels a bit like distracting celebrity casting.

But Arnold is one of the great living English-language directors. If you've already seen the essential, stunning Fish Tank with Michel Fassbinder's remarkable performance, as well as the teeming-with-life American Honey and Arnold's oddball, atmospheric version of Wuthering Heights, then you should also see this. But Bradshaw was right when he hewrote that while Bird has "fluency and energy" it is "a minor Arnold."

Bug is an energetic nutter who, to Bailey's great disapproval, is all agog about wedding a woman he's only known for three months. He has no cash for this event but plans to raise it by selling the high-value hallucinegenic slime of a frog he has obtained from Colorado. He has to find the right music that will make the frog secrete the slime and determines this is the "serious" kind. Thus the way is paved for a playlist, important because Keoghan's dance-y version of Blur's “The Universal” will be the film's finale.

The action and the trajectory of Bird form the latest iteration of the kind of celebratory English drama C.L. Barber identified in his book Shakespeare's Festive Comedy. Order and disorder mix in a lively, mostly outdoors summertime world of rural England. Into this world comes Rogowski's titular Bird, whose presence drops a surreal, magical note into this pulsating naturalistic world of order-in-disorder where chaos is forgiven and all comes basically right in the end.

How this works is shown by Bailey's 14-year-old half brother Hunter (Jason Buda)'s corrective role as a masked vigilante, the mask adding to the festive mood. Hunter has teamed up with a gang of kids who take revenge against anyone they hear has beaten their spouse or mistreated their kids.

When Bailey meets Bird, who suddenly appears next to her in a field, there is a gentleness in his oddity that makes her accept safety and kinship in him. He's also weird and has an accent that makes his claim that his family of origin is nearby feel suspect to me; plus, the celebrity casting that his presence involves. Rogowski just doesn't quite work here unless you thoroughly suspend misbelief. At one point (spoiler alert) he is going to take on a magical transformation. Another time an actual small bird is going to grab a note Bailey wants to deliver to a second-storey window and fly it up there.

All this is really fine, because the kids are charming and real and Arnold creates and maintains the mood of forgiving festive disorder. The greater trouble is that they were making it up as they went along, and the rhythm of the action falters. But nonetheless if I have succeeded I will have made you want to check this out.

Bird, 119 mins., debuted at Cannes Directors' Fortnight May 16, 2024. Also shown at Telluride, Toronto, and many other international festivals. US wide release (internet) Dec. 23, 2024. Metacritic rating: 74%.