GLR January-February 2025

FILM

Growing Up in Chaotic Times

D IRECTORANDREAARNOLD 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 ar rived actors to her projects. Her new film, Bird , which she both wrote and directed,

her search for identity and security in her rough-and-tumble neighborhood. She meets up with a stranger named Bird, played by German actor Franz Rogowski, a character whose calm demeanor and wraithlike fig ure, accentuated by the flowing kilt he sports, give him the mysterious air of a shaman. Bailey soon aids Bird on his quest

A LLEN E LLENZWEIG

BIRD Directed & wri tt en by Andrea Arnold BBC Film

to find the father who abandoned him years ago but still lives in the area. In return, Bird takes on Bailey as a partner despite their difference in age and experience, which seems to fortify Bai ley’s self-confidence. 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

premiered at NewFest, New York City’s annual LGBTQ + film festival. It’s an unsparing yet sympathetic look into the hard scrabble 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

with poetic flourishes despite the clamor of the two raucous households Bailey tog gles 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 be

guiling 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 disrup tive 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 usu ally 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 perform ance 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 presenta tion when Bug and his girlfriend marry seems a betrayal of everything we’ve known about Bailey up to that point.

Barry Keoghan and Nykiya Adams in Bird .

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. In a crucial early scene, when Bug and his girlfriend present a glittering girly outfit they bought for Bailey, the latter rejects the gift outright despite Bug’s insistence. Soon after, she cuts off most of her appealing Afro, whose bushy curls framed her beau tifully soft features. Determined to live by her own lights, Bai ley is as truculent as a pubescent boy, yet she remains tender in Allen Ellenzweig, a longtime contributor to these pages, is the author of George Platt Lynes: The Daring Eye (Oxford Univ. Press, 2021).

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