Drew Burnett Gregory is back at TIFF, reporting daily with queer movie reviews from one of the world’s most prestigious film festivals. Follow along for her coverage of the best in LGBTQ+ cinema and beyond.
Because birds fly, they’re made to represent freedom. Unless they’re caged and then the lack of it. Birds are not the metaphor. The metaphor for birds has become the metaphor. Actually watch birds, in the wild, in our cities, and there’s so much more to find than freedom.
Birds fly, yes, they also walk and hop. They peck holes in trees. They protect their eggs and feed them after they’ve hatched. And then, of course, there are birds of prey.
Within seconds of Andrea Arnold’s Bird, she shows the titular animal. Each time one or many appear on-screen, they act to push us beyond the reduction of their metaphor. We notice something new about the creatures and something new about the characters. It’s a way to find the hidden in the obvious, a fitting technique for Arnold whose films have always worked in the overt and the obscured.
Soon after meeting 12-year-old Bailey (Nykiya Adams), we watch her get scooped up on a scooter by her father Bug (Barry Keoghan). For fans of Arnold’s, there’s a playful subversion. His energy is similar to Shia LaBeouf’s character in American Honey, but instead of a misguided love interest, this agent of chaos is now the father.
Bug is especially excited on this day because he’s about to announce that he’s getting married. Bailey is not impressed. Bug has only known his now fiancée for three months and Bailey questions how he’ll afford to take care of a wife and her young kid while not neglecting Bailey or her brother further. She also has no interest in wearing the bright blue animal print bodysuit the fiancée wants for her bridesmaids. It’s unclear whether tomboy Bailey is resistant to this because of the marriage, because the outfit is feminine, or because the outfit is ugly. But, in an act of defiance, she cuts off her hair.
Desperate to get away from her home, Bailey hangs out on the outskirts of her oppressive English town. It’s here she meets another outsider named Bird (Franz Rogowski). He’s wearing a skirt and flutters around with a curiosity worthy of his name. He’s returned to town to look for his family and he asks Bailey for help.
Shot primarily on handheld 16mm with visible film edges, Bird feels like a culmination of a style Andrea Arnold has been crafting for a quarter of a century. But it’s also a heightening and push beyond this established form. Bailey is, herself, a filmmaker even if that word is never used. She records moments from her life on her phone with a commitment and artfulness that goes beyond the average youth. The first time we see this vertical footage it’s projected on Bailey’s wall. Arnold lets us into the way Bailey sees the world before fully embracing it, cutting away from 16mm to fill (part of) the screen with Bailey’s footage.
It’s not just the vertical phone images that feel new for Arnold’s visual style. If Fish Tank and American Honey were very millennial portraits of youth, here Arnold seems committed to her Gen Z protagonist. The editing style is more erratic, introducing new and old images into what could otherwise be a grounded slice-of-life. It’s thrilling to watch an artist as accomplished as Arnold reach a sort of apex of her talents while still pushing for reinvention. The result is a film that is impossible to predict from narrative to form to emotional experience.
Arnold, who is one of the few filmmakers of her stature who comes from a working class background, has always approached her characters with a matter-of-fact sense of reality. There is a big difference between the way Arnold portrays the challenges faced by people who are working class and the approach taken by other critical darlings like Ken Loach or the Dardenne Brothers. Arnold is always able to operate at an emotional intensity that includes devastation and hope while never dipping into exploitation or sentimentality. There’s a realness even within her filmic poetry.
Class is an obvious factor in the film — as is race which, like in previous work for better or worse, Arnold includes but leaves largely uncommented upon. But Arnold seems disinterested in creating a portrait of a way of life. It might be simplest to say the film is instead a portrait of, a tribute to, birds. Animals and nature have always played an important role in her work, in both the literal and in the ways human beings interact with and embody other living things.
Whenever a bird appears on-screen, it’s a reminder of the ways Arnold’s characters are like them — not only Bird himself but Bailey too. Even Bug whose name implies a different metaphor is revealed to be a caring mother hen in his own imperfect way.
Bird is Arnold’s most ambitious work. It also might be her truest masterpiece. Like a scavenging city pigeon, the more you look, the more its beauty is revealed.
