Andrea Arnold (2024)

Andrea Arnold made her film-making debut with Wasp (2003), a short that won her an Oscar.  Her first documentary was Cow (2021).  Now Bird takes its place in Arnold’s cinematic animal kingdom.  At the start of the film, the main character, Bailey, smiles fondly at a seagull that lands near to where she’s standing.  As dive-bombing greedy guts, seagulls get quite a bad press so Bailey’s reaction may be a hint that she hasn’t much else to smile about, and so it proves.  A mixed-race twelve year old, she lives with her elder brother and their father in a squat somewhere in present-day North Kent.  She has three younger half-sisters, who are with their and Bailey’s mother in a house in another rundown area; the mother’s current, violently abusive boyfriend is also in residence there.  Bailey’s parents are both drug users – the father is perpetually hyped up, the mother groggy.  Her brother, Hunter, belongs to a local group of teenage vigilantes, sorting out things the police won’t deal with.  But that momentary friendly meeting with the seagull anticipates a more important encounter that soon follows for Bailey – with a solitary thirty-something man, who calls himself Bird.

There’s plenty more animal life on evidence in the film – and on film within Arnold’s film.  Bailey’s constant companion is her iPhone.  She uses its camera to record horrors – one of Hunter’s vigilante attacks, her mother’s boyfriend’s threats against Bailey and her sisters – but, more often, to photograph the natural world:  crows or gulls on the wing, a horse in a field, a butterfly that lands on her finger.  At one point, Arnold inserts a desolate montage of shots that includes a dead bluebottle.  Bailey’s father is known as Bug:  his upper body, exposed most of the time he’s on screen, is covered with insect tattoos.  His latest barmy get-rich-quick scheme centres on a frog:  Bug’s going to persuade it to ooze sellable hallucinogenic slime (by playing it Coldplay’s ‘Yellow’).  The latest bone of contention between Bailey (Nykiya Adams) and Bug (Barry Keoghan) is his decision to marry Kayleigh (Frankie Box), his girlfriend of three months.  Bailey tells Bug she’s not going to the wedding, certainly not as a bridesmaid wearing the purple-and-white leopard-print jumpsuit that he and Kayleigh present her with.  Eventually, though – the wedding party is the story’s finale – Bailey does attend, and in the jumpsuit.  A fox also wanders into the celebrations.  Briefly but crucially, so does Bird (Franz Rogowski).

The film is itself a strange, hybrid creature – a piece of magical/kitchen-sink realism.  Bailey hasn’t a bed of her own, just a sleeping bag.  A thin curtain separates her space from Hunter’s.  She can hear his phone conversation with his girlfriend, asking anxiously when she had her last period; a moment later, Bailey is bleeding from her first period.  As for Bird’s habitat, he seems to spend nights as well as days on the roof of an apartment building.  The slightly ragged kilt he wears sometimes suggests feathers.  Bailey’s mother, Peyton (Jasmine Jobson), and her vicious boyfriend, Skate (James Nelson-Joyce), split but he soon returns to menace Peyton and the children.  Bird turns up, sprouting huge dark wings – and talons with which he attacks Skate, who disappears from the film.  The household’s pet dog that Skate had apparently killed now returns, alive and well.

Arnold’s staging of the extraordinary events in Bird is more impressive than the apparently realistic, somewhat clumsy scenario she has devised to propel the story.  Bird tells Bailey that he and his parents used to live in the flat above the one where Bailey’s mother and grandmother lived; his father disappeared when Bird was still a young child; Bird, after flying the nest himself a few years later, lost touch with his mother.  Bailey goes to ask her mother if she remembers this family and the name of the man who was Bird’s father:  zonked as she is, Peyton quickly comes up with a name; Bailey and Bird (somehow) track this man down, although the interview with him doesn’t lead anywhere.

There’s a larger problem with Bird’s realistic aspect.  From Wasp onwards, Andrea Arnold has been interested in showing the possibilities of splendour as well as misery in the lives of people deprived of love or money or both.  Here, though, the social conditions and bad habits of the characters are grimly dominant to a degree that makes the film’s transcendent elements uncomfortably fanciful – albeit Arnold knows from personal experience much of what she’s showing.  She was born (in 1961) to teenage parents, who separated when she was very young, and was raised on a Dartford council estate.  Bug and Peyton, who look to be in their late twenties, have a teenage son and a nearly teenage daughter:  Hunter (Jason Buda) wants his pregnant girlfriend to have the baby she’s expecting but Bug urges his son not to repeat the mistakes he made.  This sudden access of responsible parenting, which comes out of nowhere, seems meant to confirm that Bug, though an alarmingly loose cannon, is also a decent, loving father – it’s just his unfortunate socio-economic circumstances that get in the way.  It sounds like a positive that Arnold wants to show all her characters worthy of sympathetic interest but her generosity doesn’t extend to Skate.  It seems arbitrarily unjust for her to include someone as simply blameworthy as this in the set-up – isn’t Skate also the product of an unenviable background?

In BFI’s screenings handout, programmer Kimberley Sheehan rhapsodises about Bird as ‘warm’ and ‘exuberant’; she refers to ‘the details of working-class communities’ captured by the film.  There may no denying the existence of communities like this one but to imply, as Sheehan does, that it’s typical is outrageously insulting to working-class communities more generally.  Arnold describes a part of North Kent where there appear to be no schools or contraceptives or people in employment.  The young vigilantes’ claim that the police do nothing is taken as read:  no one in Bird tries phoning 999.  It’s maybe the film’s non-realistic parts that allow the likes of Kimberley Sheehan to feel comfortable writing as she does.  Bird enters Bailey’s life when she wakes up from sleeping in a field to see him standing before her.  He exits after partnering her in a dance at Bug and Kayleigh’s wedding reception and assuring Bailey that everything will be all right.  Is much of what we’re seeing just Bailey’s imagination – is Bird the fantasy figure she needs in her life at this particular stage of it, in order to come through?  Nonsensical as this may sound, does interpreting Arnold’s film in this way help to make even the brute facts of Bailey’s existence less troubling?

Although Bailey looks older than twelve, newcomer Nykiya Adams actually was that age when Bird was shot in mid-2023.  It’s right enough that Bailey has to seem mature beyond her years:  she’s as protective as she can be to her younger siblings and her feckless mother.  The girl is, of course, vulnerable too:  she seems all the more vulnerable, as well as more tomboyish, when she decides to have her hair cut.  Nykiya Adams has a directness that’s very likeable.  Barry Keoghan’s Bug is the latest impressive addition to his gallery of dynamic oddballs.  (There’s an in-joke reference in Bird, by the way, to Sophie Ellis-Bextor’s ‘Murder on the Dancefloor’:  Saltburn was in the can by the time the film was shot.).  Arnold handles the whole cast well, although Jasmine Jobson’s Peyton stands out as too acted, and thereby a bit incongruous.  Bird is saved by the amazingly versatile Franz Rogowski in the title role.  Following on from his admirably complex portrait of the protagonist in Sebastian Meise’s fine drama Great Freedom (2021), Rogowski made his character in Ira Sachs’ Passages (2023) potently hateful, despite the film’s stupidity.  In Bird, his unusual looks and speech, and extraordinarily authentic gentleness, are a remarkable combination.  Rogowski’s acting is completely natural yet he’s highly charismatic.  Bird is both as fragilely human and as out of this world as Andrea Arnold’s film needs him to be.

15 November 2024