Andrea Arnold’s Bird is a gritty, magical realist drama about coming of age in a broken Britain.
Bailey (Nykiya Adams) is a young girl living with her father Bug (Barry Keoghan) in a run-down squat in deindustrialised Gravesend, Kent. When she meets Bird (Franz Rogowski), she is initially wary but gradually warms to him and helps him to find his missing family.
Bird is an almost shockingly grim portrait of the decline of England into the Yookay, a miserable, failed economic zone that seems closer to the world of Mad Max or Gummo than it is to Love, Actually. There isn’t one particularly clear narrative in Bird, but there are a lot of little glimpses that contribute to your understanding of its world. Parents barely older than their children live in a state of indolent arrested development, children form vigilante gangs to threaten miscreants, phones are wielded constantly to capture evidence, families are spread out in litters so loosely as to be hard to determine, total poverty is the norm and it’s unclear how any form of hygiene is even possible.
Despite this general aimlessness, there is very much an antagonist in Bird. Skate (James Nelson-Joyce) is a brute who abuses Bailey’s mother (Jasmine Jobson). Skate is eventually dealt with in a way that defies explanation to the point that it will likely lose some of its audience. It’s impossible to describe without giving away too much, but it pushes the film into what is either surrealism or fantasy depending on one’s reading. Is what happens Bailey’s way of interpreting events to shield her from the horror? Is Bird something more than he initially seems?
Director Arnold takes the perspective of the underclass and tries hard to salvage some of the beauty and joy from the absolute squalour of their environment. Shot almost exclusively with handheld cameras by Robbie Ryan, it carefully relays the fascination of Bailey with the natural world that creeps in through the cracks in the run-down town. The aspect ratio is narrowed and there is some faux-film vignetting to add a hazy feel to the picture. There are certainly some striking moments but the frantic, shuddery camerawork is, at times, quite nauseating. At times it feels like the film is looking at the horror of its world just a little too coolly and dispassionately and consoling you with its characters’ ability to see beauty, create naive art, find cheerful accessories and otherwise deal with utter anomie. You could see it as humanising the people it’s depicting, but it’s also something like a repurposing of the Noble Savage myth. Everything’s terrible, but it’s a charming kind of terrible.
Bird is not a film that all audiences will either enjoy or find satisfying but for those that are willing to go with it, it is full of moments that will likely haunt them.
