BIRD
Directed & written by Andrea Arnold
BBC Film
DIRECTOR ANDREA ARNOLD has been on the indie circuit for years, winning an Oscar for Best Live Action Short in 2005 and notable Jury Prize awards at Cannes. She attracts up-and-coming and newly arrived actors to her projects. Her new film, Bird, which she both wrote and directed, premiered at NewFest, New York City’s annual LGBTQ+ film festival. It’s an unsparing yet sympathetic look into the hardscrabble life of the tough but vulnerable twelve-year-old Bailey, played by newcomer Nykiya Adams, an interracial girl who more-or-less presents as a boy, and her rambunctious father, “Bug,” played with screen-stealing gusto by the Irish actor Barry Keoghan, who recently rocketed to fame in Saltburn. They live in a “squat” in north Kent, a shabby flat whose walls are screaming with graffiti. This pairs up well with Bug’s tatted face, chest, and arms, which advertise his outsize emotional temperatures. He both loves Bailey and demands her fealty.
Complicating Bailey’s allegiances is her biological mother, who lives with a fiercely misogynistic lout and her three younger children. Their household is tense, yet Bailey ministers to her half-siblings with surprising warmth. Andrea Arnold shoots Bird with poetic flourishes despite the clamor of the two raucous households Bailey toggles between. This young person, alone in her fight to establish her identity, finds comfort in the natural world available to her: entranced by flocks of birds roaming the skies or a swimming hole that gives her a momentary reprieve away from life’s noise.
As Bird, Franz Rogowski offers a beguiling portrait of a somewhat off-center creature, using his remarkably soft-spoken delivery and expressive face to engage Bailey without the least threat or hint of the predatory. Indeed, his slender physique and kilt blowing in the breeze give him a vaguely intersex quality matching that of Bailey. That he assumes a protective role at a key moment later in the film might be anticipated, yet the form it takes is at once shocking and disruptive to the otherwise brute realism of the narrative.
The dialects in Bird sometimes escaped me, confusing plot points and characters’ relationships, though over time these usually became clear. In fact, the film is not driven by its plot, which shambles noisily from incident to incident. Rather, it is held together by the remarkably strong and assured performance of Nykiya Adams as Bailey who, more than Barry Keoghan or even Franz Rogowski, carries the film. That said, at film’s end, Bailey’s retreat into an acceptable gender presentation when Bug and his girlfriend marry seems a betrayal of everything we’ve known about Bailey up to that point.
Allen Ellenzweig, a longtime contributor to these pages, is the author of George Platt Lynes: The Daring Eye (Oxford Univ. Press, 2021).
