Barry Keoghan in strange suburban fairytale Bird — LFF review
Set and shot in director Andrea Arnold’s old stomping grounds of northwest Kent, England, Bird feels relentlessly modern, buoyed by a snappy, fragmented editing style and an excellent electronic score by Burial, and relentlessly human, a story about relationships between people on the fringes of society who look to each other so as to not be ignored. In that sense it felt like a grittier take on the excellent 2021 movie Firstness, which similarly tracks the relationship between an idiosyncratic man and a young kid whose father is too caught up in his own problems to really pay attention to what they’re doing during the day. While that film certainly exudes a certain unreality, Bird manages to both step further into the fantastical and further into the all-too-real.
The duo whose relationship serves as the beating heart of the film consists of Bailey, played by Nykiya Adams, and the titular Bird, played by Franz Rogowski. Bailey is a 12-year-old living with her dad and brother in a run-down flat. Her dad, played by Barry Keoghan, is openly immature, his spats with Bailey seeming more like those between siblings than a father and daughter. He’s planning to marry his girlfriend, an idea Bailey despises, and he thinks he will be able to fund it by selling the hallucinogenic secretions of a toad. Meanwhile, Bailey’s brother (Hunter, played by Jason Buda) goes out to enact violent vigilante justice on local creeps with his gang of friends, an activity that Bailey is initially interested in joining in on simply to prove something. Her brother refuses to take her along, citing the fact that she is “just a kid” (there’s always some humor to a 15 year old saying that to a 12 year old). During one such excursion, Bailey secretly follows the group, but she is scared off when the police show up, leading her to run to a field of grasses and horses.
While Bailey is squatting in a patch of tall grass, a strong wind rolls in with an unnatural pulsing. And then, Bird appears, as if he arrived with the wind itself. There’s something about him that feels plucked from a different world: He’s energetic, carefree. He has a gentle voice. He seems uncertain about his own situation, but he does know that he’s looking for his long-lost family, as he knows his parents once lived in North Kent. Bailey is distrustful, understandably so, but she still helps him by pointing him in the right direction, and then she can’t help but follow him after pretending to depart a different way.
Franz Rogowski exudes kindness and gentleness as the titular Bird and, much like with Caleb Cabrera in Firstness, the casting really had to be just right to make the relationships in this work. Anyone who falls short of a completely unthreatening demeanor would be difficult to swallow in the role of Bird. But his demeanor, his fragmented story — it’s all so compelling. Bailey thinks so, too, and she gradually warms up to Bird. She senses his brokenness through his naked emotionality, perhaps, and she feels inclined to help him, especially as she holds some part of the key to Bird’s past. “I thought we’d meet again,” Bird says, which sounds something like what would be said by a wizard in a fantasy story. But maybe he simply knows that Bailey’s trauma and his own, left yet unspoken, bear similarities that draw the two together.
A convergence of circumstances lead Bird and Bailey to bring Bailey’s younger siblings to a beach town, to which they’ve traced Bird’s roots. This is a movie in search of joy, and it often finds it even when darker things are hanging over every scene. When the characters go to the beach, you want desperately for them to give themselves completely to the joy of the moment, even if the time will come when it all ends. There’s so much warmth in the relationships between Bailey and her siblings, and with the honorary family member Bird.
The magical realism in Bird comes in varying doses, beginning with Bird’s unexplained appearance in the field. And then there’s his peculiar tendency to stand on the top of buildings, peering down at Bailey, an image that bleeds into the night as Bailey sees a strange, dreamlike figure peering through her window from a roof in the distance. Whether this is real or a dream hardly seems to matter, but it’s this image that the movie spawned around, with director Andrea Arnold describing the movie’s concept growing from the image of “a tall, thin man with a long penis, standing on a roof,” who she “didn’t know if he was good or bad or what he was.” This movie is undoubtedly a fairy tale, or a “fable,” as it calls itself, and to what degree it aligns with that description is best left discovered in the context of the film itself. That being said, the level to which it grapples with the collision between reality and the surreal is perhaps the film’s strongest attribute, especially in the context of Arnold’s ever-grounded filmography. Every frame, especially those with Rogowski in view, has a certain magic to it even with the harrowing social realism of it all.
This is also, of course, a coming of age tale, and it’s stellar at that. Bailey navigates her preteen life with a relatable angst and uncertainty. At times she tries to blend in with the older teens, at times she is a tender and loving “adult” figure to her younger siblings, but beyond all of that it is clear that she is only a kid. She has equal parts fragility and curiosity within her, and she finds beauty in a terrifying life. She films things — moths, horses, birds, Bird — and projects them onto the wall of her dilapidated flat, watches them over and over again. There’s a question of why, but there’s an answer of why not?
There’s a beauty and tenderness at the core of this film, and that’s what I hold onto after it ends. That and the feathers.
