Bird
Bird
Bird: This project is all hers; she leads and tackles every stage. Eight years ago, the writer-director Andrea Arnold put away her brands of kitchen-sink British austerity in a handheld camera and crossed the pond to shoot “American Honey”, a film about kids in a van who capture the energy and chaos of 21st century America. THis hips ‘Dardenne brothers goes hip hop’ autobiographical narrative, was an explosion of indie cinema that certainly seemed important.
But now, in ‘Bird’ her first dramatic feature since an interlude occupied with the episodes of Big Little Lies and Transparent and the Cow Documentary, Arnold has chosen to turn back to the detailed narration of sad and depressive lives of impoverished British youths with no direction who consider every moment of their life to be a brace of wasteland. Pardon my blindness, but I have to admit that I want to complain that she should have stayed at the party.
Every year, Arnold has been running from one Cannes to the next, as worries of critics do not accuse him. So it will definitely be new for me when I leave the circle and say that “Bird,” which is presented at Cannes for the first time today, does not quite work as a film. In any case, “Bird” has Arnold’s empathy and ethical motives, as well as her unpolished enthusiasm for craft. It also has two rather up and coming attractive actors in major parts of the drama.
The star of film is quite different now in ‘how he carries himself’ (he gives the impression that he is a star)—Barry Keoghan plays Bug, a single father of two children who lives in a squat in Kent, and when it comes to his kids, spends precisely zero minutes playing ‘dad’.
What Bug has gotten way out of control is on inking. Why did he, though? His pale torso bears markings of many different forms of life: from a fly to a spider, but most significantly, there is a rather large detailed centipede starting from the rights cheeks wrapping around and down his neck. But Bug’s children are simply bugs to Bug.
An example is the film’s heroine, Bailey (Nykiya Adams), who is twelve but has an adult appearance. That’s part of her wise-beyond-her-years quality, but it is also the fact that she is quiet and hard, and fixed in that position of seizing around her. The heroine enacts show more contempt than sympathy. Bailey’s mother stays above a crack house in another area of the city with a boyfriend who is (of course) a violent compulsive abuser.
Showing Bailey going to her mother’s place, Arnold in her indie rock Dardenne mode, gives us quite a few camera tracking Bailey carrying out her actions over a pivoted wire mesh in the bridge and while at it, that which shows why she is a runaway. The movie in also includes Bailey’s cell phone video recordings, especially her observations of birds which were later projected to the wall.
It will be observed that Bailey’s head is crowned with braids at the beginning, but in a twinkling of an eye filled with bitterness she cuts them off, and this makes her look that much bleaker. I should mention that her half-brother, Hunter (Jason Buda) is a member of a rather decayed and disorganized savage youth group that goes about the neighborhood dressed in among other horrible garments, scary masks, looking for some poorly perceived individuals to scare. The sort of retaliations that this child version of the “Clockwork Orange” gangster squad issue(“Slice Him!” is a clear order given by a woman of this gang.) is in fact worse than the offence.
We’re all aware of the adoration folks have for Arnold’s film “A Testament To The Spirit.” There remains, some place in the world, and at times of course a very necessary one, a movie like “Bird,” which preserves the sentiments of early Arnold films clikes “Fish Tank.”
But as I see Arnold at this stage, it is no longer making a pathos of wasted lifetime teenagers marvel — she is injecting herself in neorealist depression as if it was like cocaine. Keoghan’s performance is awfully cartoonish (he plays a complacent father but does not give the appearance of being a father at all).
And unlike Bug, who is on a marrying spree after three months of infatuation (where the wedding will be funded through influencing the sale of toad slime), amused disdain of Bailey towards this seeming injustice seems excessive once more. Yes, she is twelve, but she even refuses to wear a purple-flecked catsuit and be a bridesmaid. This is where the term “Independence” takes on an unreasonable level of precocity.
While exploring, Bailey encounters an odd man with a tenderness wound, a man dressed in a skirt. His character Bird is portrayed by a German actor known as Franz Rogowski, who played the male diva heterosexualofiler in Ira Sachs’ ‘Passages’ so disturbingly that he has thrown the entire movie off the board. In terms of the range of character dynamics, Bird lies on the completely different side. He is a soft heart and pleasant looking, a delicate , a cross between Joaquin Phoenix in a crushed velvet outfit and Klaus K is glamorous, but so everything about him is easily breakable.
Bailey and Bird befriend each other not because of an unusual fusion in ordinary disposition, but that is the high concept of the film. Bailey helps Bird in his quest to find his birth father who abandoned him. And he helps her on the other hand by saying, well, he bears his name.
The tale of a miserable emotional penniless person slashing through remember’s raw story or “bird”, will delight readers and followers of Andrea Arnold, perhaps. This is Arnold wanting to be as hidebound and yet attractive, in her works. “Bird” is also a feel-bad movie that becomes a feel good movie. What it never feels like is a completely honest and tropical showing.
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- Genre: Drama
- Country: United States
- Director: Andrea Arnold
- Cast: Nykiya Adams, Franz Rogowski, Barry Keoghan
