Programme Notes: Bird

It’s been eight years since we last got a scripted feature film by Andrea Arnold. Apologies for using oddly specific language – the ‘Directed by Andrea Arnold’ credit has definitely flashed up on our screens since American Honey’s release in 2016, but Bird is the first non-documentary, non-television work she’s produced since then. Since directing every episode of HBO’s Big Little Lies Season 2 (and then getting shut out of the editing room), Arnold directed Cow, a minimalist documentary charting the punishing life of a dairy cow, which illustrated its environmental message with her deft style and talent, but left fans of the spirited spontaneity of her scripted stories a bit disappointed. There’s no doubt that Bird has everything we like about Arnold in full force.

In the opening shot, a gull soars across the Gravesend, England sky, watched by a curious camera within the metal grating of a covered footbridge. The shot has a handheld, naturalistic energy to it, like it’s something we’ve casually, naturally observed, but the shot carries a clear symbolic weight that frames the whole film. We’re watching an animal’s freedom from within an all-encompassing cage down on the ground; freedom and imprisonment are felt most keenly on the inside.

This is also how we meet Bailey (Nykiya Adams), our 12-year-old protagonist who feels neglected by her father Bug (Barry Keoghan), a young man distracted with his new fiance and a scheme to sell the hallucinogenic slime of a rare toad. It’s not just her father who Bailey has to worry about – her older half-brother Hunter (Jason Buda) is faced with prematurely becoming an expectant father, and she has three younger siblings living with her mother (Jasmine Jobson) and a new abusive boyfriend (James Nelson-Joyce). There’s a lot of unspoken emotional labour that has been loaded onto this preteen, a product of being forced to grow up with little guidance or safety net, and Arnold reveals the desires and hang-ups of her close-chested, impoverished main character by refusing to conform to the drab, grounded conventions of British social realism.

Every time we see images blown up on a lightweight home projector, or the film stock cinematography undermined by videos on a phone camera, or fragments of footage replaying and looping like memories forming in real time, Arnold reminds us how her films function on a visual level: the way we frame and juxtapose images of the world around us is a crucial way of finding internal clarity or freedom, even if we remain stuck in difficult, neglectful places.

Arnold doesn’t just play with images to unpick the unrest of Britain’s youth in poverty, the soundtrack is fittingly unpredictable too. With multiple generations gathered under a single shared roof – sometimes with a mere 15-year age gap separating a father from his son – the range of tunes blasting from portable speakers paints a cluttered but vibrant portrait of communal life. But while Fontaines D.C., Blur, Coldplay, and Sleaford Mods have a diegetic presence in busy scenes, the way that electronic artist Burial loops simple chords and rhythmic beats makes his experimental score feel like a subconscious undercurrent to Bailey’s coming-of-age story.

The key to Bailey unlocking her cage is Bird (Franz Rogowski), a drifter who makes Bailey’s acquaintance in a dawn-lit field with a playful, withholding excitement. Rogowski has brought an implacable and uncertain presence to many great European films (notably Great Freedom, Transit, and Victoria) but after his searing and off-putting performance as the king of the narcissists in Ira Sachs’ Passages, it’s great to see him play a naive, other-worldly companion, almost like a personified representation of Bailey’s unarticulated and buried pains.

Bird’s quest for his unknown Gravesend parents may be a mundane one – knocking on doors, enquiring about previous tenants, probing vague memories with even vaguer questions – but the way the lanky, docile Bird looms over the fierce, bottled-up Bailey in cluttered rooms and on overgrown pavements makes them feel like adventurers in some off-kilter, low-budget urban fantasy. The way that Bailey asserts Bird’s right to reunite his family and be readily accepted back home reveals a lot about her own suppressed desires to belong, be acknowledged, and feel whole. 

The lingering shots of vigilant avian wildlife peppered through scenes, not to mention Rogowski’s twitchy, animalistic physicality, may tip you off early about the magical realism that emerges triumphantly in the final act. But even if you think you know what the fantastical reveal will be, Bird’s explosive metamorphosis packs a tremendous emotional punch, and it’s difficult to think of a more apt way for Bird’s motifs of animalistic freedom, instinct, and protective vigour to reach their climax.

Arnold’s work is nearly always filtered through the perspective of young, disaffected women (often as part of an ensemble of hand-picked unprofessional actors), and Bird’s story of a teenage girl trying to balance contradictory urges within an impoverished family unit feels reminiscent of Fish Tank, while the fact that it features a non-white woman forging ambiguous relationships in defiance of her family obligations puts it in direct conversation with American Honey.

Bird is a complex visual feat, filled with confidential, roving close-ups and bursts of disorienting movement that indicate an instinctive filmmaking verve. The frequent interjections of reused, recontextualised footage are a sign of Arnold returning to a more experimental storytelling style after the conventions of prestige television, but they’re also perhaps a symptom of the difficult, challenging pressures that hit the production once cameras started rolling.

Arnold has noted that Bird was the most challenging of her films to make, citing bureaucratic roadblocks that undermined her wild sensibilities.  Her regular cinematographer Robbie Ryan (who is also the go-to director of photography for Ken Loach and Yorgos Lanthimos) has clarified that the chaos and roadblocks of Bird’s set ‘went a bit over the top’.  At times, Bird has a looser, freer spirit than some of Arnold’s earlier films (which is saying something), but it’s not the case that the film feels rushed or patched together. Instead, it possesses a true restless spirit; we feel fused to Bailey’s questioning, frustrated gaze with Arnold’s subjective, impulsive formal choices. Bird doesn’t feel like characters have been created from thin air, it feels like a filmmaker has tried, with great effort and skill, to reach out and connect with people and experiences that exist around us.

7 November 2024

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