Writer and Director: Andrea Arnold
No one makes films like Andrea Arnold and although many have tried, the director’s young female-led films find beauty and meaning in places where no one else would think to look. Showcasing only her third full-length feature at the BFI London Film Festival 2024, Bird marries together some of the techniques and perspectives that have become characteristic of Arnold’s work in places of intersection: young women on the cusp of adulthood, places where grim urban living meets nature and where the often-violent intensity of men affects mothers, daughters and sisters trapped in their glare.
12-year-old Bailey lives with her dad, Bug, and his kids in a squat filled with music, graffiti, drugs and his lairy friends. When she discovers he is about to marry girlfriend Kayleigh, Bailey fears life is about to change, finding a similar isolation at her mother’s house where the terrifying Skate has moved himself in. But meeting the quiet and kind Bird who grew up on her estate years before, Bailey agrees to help him discover what happened to his family.
Arnold’s films sit squarely in the social realism category, accurate depictions of poor communities living in flats and terraced council houses in Gravesend that are vivid and lively, places filled with children, noise and activity, places forgotten by government and other filmmakers. But Arnold’s worlds are not depressing or judgemental, and although tricky for her young protagonists to navigate while discovering their bodies and soon-to-be adult selves for the first time, there is always music, dancing and times of everyday joy that bring families together. Following a similar trajectory to Fish Tank, Bird also includes a day trip, a moment to escape from the norm and plenty of hope that her characters can find happiness and purpose. Whatever else may be happening in Arnold’s films, it is always summer.
Bird once again brings nature into the story, shots of grassy fields with horses (another Fish Tank nod) that butt against the housing developments, but the natural world also enters the urban space with creatures like Bug’s toad which he is using to secrete hallucinogens, the butterflies and flies that appear in Bailey’s window and the ever-present seagulls that fill the air. Like American Honey, the juxtaposition of these spaces with the grimy surfaces and unwashed floors of the human characters is hugely evocative about these places where generations are the same – another point made in the film with discussions of teen pregnancies – and there is little opportunity for powerless young women to escape for good.
More than anywhere else in her films, Bird looks at different kinds of masculinity and the complexities of manly behaviours in relation to Bailey’s experience. She sits on the periphery of gang violence perpetrated by young men not much older than she is, there is domestic violence from dangerous men like Skate (James Nelson-Joyce) and the men like her dad Bug (Barry Keoghan) who look the part of neglectful father but take on the role of single parent (another Arnold characteristic), wanting a stable family life with children he ultimately cares for. And then there is Bird (Franz Rogowski), unlike any man she has ever met, gentle, moderate and protective, giving Bailey agency and choice without saying very much at all.
Discovering Nykiya Adams who plays Bailey is another great Arnold find and carries the film with great confidence and the audience see this life from her perspective, both as an outsider and, over the course of the film, someone who is bought back into the reality of it. The couple of moments of magical realism later in the film may prove divisive, although arguably these may be projections of Bailey’s subconscious trying to protect her from threat, but Bird is another magnificent achievement from a filmmaker whose work is unparalleled in modern cinema.
Bird is screening at the BFI London Film Festival 2024.
