Bird, the review of the film by Andrea Arnold

There are films, and there are films by Andrea Arnold. However copied, cited, honored (because it’s easy to say “independent cinema”), she is the only contemporary author capable of best emphasizing the power of the story linked to the power of images. And she does it by constantly playing with opposites: brutality and sweetness, beauty and ugliness. A constant of her cinema (which you will find in American Honey the most explanatory track), a constant of his language which, although abused worldwide, ends up touching on Bird new forms and new paths, without ever seeming exaggerated in what will then become a training journey with extraordinarily surreal features, relying on an animalistic allegory (right from the title) which will reflect the performances of its highly sought after interpreters (and here we have some they are exceptional).

It seems trivial to write it, but Bird, presented in competition at Cannes 2023, is a film with a very strong cinematic reverberation. More, it’s the movie more cinematic among all those directed by the British director. An author in constant contact with artistic freedom, who in fact constructs her stories through a lucid and uncomfortable gaze in putting before us a reality with a very bitter, poisonous taste. Yet, behind Birdthere is another Odyssey: a journey of knowledge, of encounters, of rediscovered light. “This was my most painful film, yet it made me realize how extraordinary life is”, the director will say, on the eve of the world premiere. A quote perhaps unsuitable for a review, but which best exposes the paradigm behind a work with necessary and ambitious imperfections.

Bird, of hallucinogenic frogs and wasted lives

Because then, explains Arnold, perfection leads to nothing. It is in the scratches and irregularities that the mystery of beauty is hidden. Perhaps for this reason, the director responds to an angry and infamous world by choosing the huge eyes by Nykiya Adams, an amazing newcomer who plays Bailey. A twelve-year-old who lives in a squat in Kent, in the south-east of England, together with her brother Hunter (Jason Buda) and her very particular father (to put it mildly) Bug (Barry Keoghan, better and better), who rides a scooter and listens to Blur while trying to make a toad vomit a hallucinogenic substance. In short, not the best father in the world, but not the worst either. Bailey’s life, grappling with a subdued sexual indecision, is disjointed, fragmented, crumpled. Her mother, Peyton (Jasmine Jobson), lives with her two younger sisters on the other side of the city, in a dimension made extremely uncomfortable by her violent cohabitant. Somehow Bailey is looking for a reaction, or rather a place in the world. And if we’re talking about narrative clarity, the film takes flight (literally) when the girl becomes friends with a kind and lost stray who, in fact, calls himself Bird (Franz Rogowski).

The skies of Andrea Arnold

And it is thanks to the strange friendship between Bird and Bailey that the work opens in its second part (presented at Cannes with a rough cut, i.e. a preliminary editing), broadening its gaze even further towards a constipated geography from deformity and enchantment. A precise aesthetic key, as well as narrative, supported by Joe Bini’s editing and Robbie Ryan’s leaden photography (after all, we are in Kent!). A key that Andrea Arnold, at least in part, revolutionizes in an emotional turmoil that leaves no time for tears or smiles, sizzling those surreal notes that recall fairy tales, summed up in the engaging harmony of a song that will return often: TheUniversal by Blur.

So, when the film seems to have taken its path, the presence of Bird (an extravagant individual who will make us ask ourselves many times where he comes from) shakes up the story, leading us, like Bailey, to roll our eyes. The same sky that, for Arnold, becomes the perfect stage (she had already done it with American Honey: Andrea Arnold’s skies are the best), helping her to enhance the strength of a cinema that works through images, stimuli and emotions , without wanting to save money. The sky, for the director, and for the protagonist, will be a meeting point, the end and then the beginning. The lysergic aspiration to wonder, far from a truth that does not evade the drama, nor sweetens what is out there, but rather accompanies us into a trembling hell, in which the hand-held camera does not anticipate but follows, as if it were a guardian ready to reassure us and hug us. This is Bird, a film that reminds us how important three simple words are: everything will be okay.