Andrea Arnold’s Bird starts off with what might feel like a wee bit of a feint: A 12-year-old named Bailey (Nykiya Adams) is filming a flock of seabirds on her phone. They’re gliding high above the beaches in the British county of Kent, near the bunker-like apartment building where Bailey lives with Hunter (Jason Buda), her gangster-wannabe stepbrother, and Bug (Barry Keough), her tattooed manchild of a dad. And given the way this young, amateur cinematographer has framed her avian subjects between the openings of a fence, it almost appears like she’s viewing them from the window of a cell. Bailey, too, would like to feel as free as those creatures of the sky. You naturally assume that the title refers, in the most aspirational way, to her. She is the one longing to spread her wings and fly, fly away.
But no, there’s actually a character named Bird, who happens to flutter into her life in the most unusual of ways. Bailey has just found out her dad is getting married to his new girlfriend, Kayleigh (Frankie Box), she’s supposed to wear a purple leopard-skin catsuit as a bridesmaid, and the kid is having none of it. As an act of rebellion, Bailey shaves her head. She also witnesses Hunter slice up a fellow teen’s face, then sprints away from the scene of the crime.
And that’s when she encounters a mysterious stranger (Franz Rogowski) in a skirt, wandering around a field. This rando who goes by “Bird” initially freaks Bailey out. Then he starts posing and dancing like a loon for her camera, before skipping away. Later, she sees him perched on the corner of a high-rise several flights up, just observing everything around him. (At a press conference after the movie’s premiere at Cannes, Arnold said that this film started with an image of “a very tall, thin man with a long penis standing on a roof.” We can confirm that most, but not every aspect of that vision made it intact to the screen.) There’s something about him that Bailey can’t shake. She recognizes a kindred-spirit outsider when she sees one.
A British filmmaker who has a knack for making everyday-people environments look both gritty and lyrical, Arnold appears to be very much in her coming-of-age comfort zone here — given the dynamic between the thirtysomething Bird and the tween Bailey, as well as the working-class background, you’d be forgiven for thinking this was something like a companion piece to her superficially similar Fish Tank (2009). Like Bird, that film also benefited greatly from the restless, manic cinematography of her longtime collaborator Robbie Ryan; a central performance from a newcomer that brims with raw talent and screen presence to burn; and a handsome, well-known actor providing a bad male role model.
This time, the dodgy father figure is more of a standard-issue paternal fuck-up than a predator, and Keough commits to leaning in on the character’s laddish immaturity and rough edges. Bug is a bit of a grifter, and his big get-rich-quick scheme is to sell the hallucinogenic secretions of a toad he mail-ordered from Colorado. (Told that the amphibians “slime” when they listen to crap pop songs, his mates suggest they put on “Murder on the Dance Floor.” The Saltburn in-joke may be unintentional, but it’s still funny to hear Keough yell from offscreen, “Hey, I like that song!”) Both he and Rogowski, whose Bird is less a surrogate dad than a fellow sensitive misfit — and is, in fact, on a quest to find his own long-lost dad — help flesh out these gents orbiting around Adams scrappy, pent-up pubescent. As for the young performer at the center of it all, we hope this is the beginning of a long, fruitful career for her.
Barry Keough in ‘Bird.’
Robbie Ryan/Mubi
There are more bits and pieces of plot floating around Arnold’s vision of a kid growing up hard and fast in a teenage wasteland, from Bailey’s infatuation with joining Hunter’s vigilante gang to her dealings with her mother (Jasmine Jobson) and the domestic abuser of a boyfriend (James Nelson-Joyce). Mostly, however, it’s Bailey and her oddball new friend, traipsing through Kent’s streets, sitting in graffiti-filled flats or interacting with real local residents all over town. For a long while, Bird trudges along like just another dirty-kitchen-sink drama, filled with lives of quiet desperation, muted dignity and — courtesy of one of many visual grace notes that Arnold throws in — the occasional passing cruise ship that’s so close, yet so very far away.
That is, until it very much deviates from the U.K. Miserablism 101 storytelling norm. There are dollops of magical realism sprinkled throughout, if you know to look for them. There are also suspicions about the true nature of this stranger, who seems both kind and borderline kooky. Let’s just say that when those suspicions are confirmed, they are done so in the most outré, disruptive, and stylish manner possible, and you either very much go with this pivot or you do not. Bird may be the most divisive movie of Andrea Arnold’s career, and we’re including the gloriously feral 2011 adaptation of Wuthering Heights. But like everything else she’s done to date, it’s also rewarding in unexpected ways — the sort of film that taps into endless reservoir of empathy as much as it shocks you with extremities.
Daniel D`Amico for SANREMO.FM
