Bird
[…] A film that seems to be making less of a point about the milieu it portrays than about the creative potential that is left in the genre it ostensibly identifies as.
Text: Alan Mattli

The cinema of Andrea Arnold, steeped as it is in the tradition of British kitchen-sink social realism, is very much concerned with the tension between expectation and reality, with confronting bourgeois audiences’ preconceived notions about class with its own empathetic depictions of poverty and working-class life. Take Fish Tank (2009) and American Honey (2016), her most celebrated films: they are, in essence, efforts to showcase the complexity and the multitudes of experiences that exist on the economic fringes of contemporary Britain and America.
This approach has not been without its critics, however. American Honey in particular – a road movie set in the American Midwest starring an African American protagonist – became a topic of sometimes heated debate when it played in theatres in the autumn of 2016, amid larger cultural conversations about class, race, and the difference between “authentic” and “appropriative” (or even “exploitative”) cinematic representations thereof. More than eight years on, such discourses have only intensified and become even more culturally ubiquitous, rendering Arnold’s brand of social realism an increasingly thorny proposition.
So it is perhaps only logical that in Bird, the English writer-director’s first fiction effort since American Honey, her formula of defying audience expectation folds in on itself, resulting in an altogether curious film that seems to be making less of a point about the milieu it portrays than about the creative potential that is left in the genre it ostensibly identifies as.
On the surface, Arnold is undoubtedly wandering on familiar terrain here. Her protagonist is Bailey (Nykiya Adams), a twelve-year-old girl who lives with her older half-brother Hunter (Jason Buda) and their twentysomething father Bug (Barry Keoghan) in a crumbling apartment block in Gravesend, outside of London; and large parts of the film follow the generic playbook. Hunter is a directionless teenager naïvely planning to develop his crew of fellow wannabe gangsters into a force of hired goons. Bug, still half a child himself (an impression deepened by the brilliant casting of the notoriously boyish-looking Keoghan), is convinced that the “drug toad” he’s just bought is going to make his fortune, or at least bankroll his impending marriage to Kailey (Frankie Box), a woman he’s only known for three months. Meanwhile, Bailey, alienated not just from her brother and father but also from her mother (Jasmine Jobson) who is tangled up in an abusive relationship, is looking for meaning, human connection, and an outlet for her pent-up anger and frustration at finding herself, for lack of a better phrase, the main character in a British kitchen-sink drama.
However, the generic familiarity is promptly broken with the appearance of Bird (Franz Rogowski), who starts hanging around Bailey’s apartment complex: not only does the fluttery, soft-spoken, German-accented man in a skirt ask her probing questions about the people who live in the building; but he appears to be an actual bird of prey, sent from the realm of storybook fantasy to act as a guardian angel of sorts to Bailey – though one with his own emotional baggage to work through.
It’s a bold magical-realist incursion into a film that, at first, seems to yoke itself firmly to the legacy of Tony Richardson and Ken Loach, as evidenced by DP Robbie Ryan – a seasoned Arnold (and Loach) collaborator – and his trademark handheld shots of Bailey moving through dilapidated housing estates and chain-link-fenced motorway overpasses as she rebels against the lot her immature father has saddled her with. Indeed, the presence of Bird is arguably the film’s major weakness, both because Franz Rogowski’s affected performance veers dangerously close to self-parody in places, and because the character’s own journey is necessarily more of a sketch than Bailey’s and is thus missing the specificity that would allow it to rise above the clichéd tropes it evokes.
As a deliberate subversion of the genre’s conventional bids for realism however, Bird is a conceptually inspired addition. Acting as something of a distancing effect, he calls into question the authenticity of the film’s generic gestures almost by implication: what if the primary plot of Bird – a story of youth delinquency, teenage pregnancy, and fanciful ways of dealing drugs in the outskirts of London – is itself based on the folklore peddled by sensationalist tabloid headlines and classist political discourse?
Intriguingly, even the film’s narrative arc gently bends the way of fairy-tale fantasy rather than that of kitchen-sink realism, culminating neither in tragic catastrophe nor “nuanced” emotional ambiguity but in a strikingly affirmative conclusion. The climactic series of familial rapprochements, set to a steady stream of catchy pop music, is both a welcome break with genre protocol and a dramatically earned destination, grounded in Arnold, Adams, Buda, and Keoghan’s delicate, gradual character work that turns what might, in a lesser film, have been crude caricatures into well-rounded, unapologetically larger-than-life figures.
It hardly seems like an accident that all of this is filtered through the point of view of Bailey – a creatively inclined pre-teen who shoots experimental portrait-mode films on her phone. If Bird is Arnold wrestling obliquely and, at times, somewhat clumsily with the genre that has defined much of her career – its representational ethics, its narrative limitations, its fraught relationship with its own fictionality – this perspective is as close as the film gets to a programmatic statement: if social-realist cinema is to have a future, it can’t be afraid of getting a little fantastical.
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Bird | Film | Andrea Arnold | UK-USA-FR-DE 2024 | 119’ | Zurich Film Festival 2024 | CH-Distribution: Frenetic Films
First published: January 12, 2025