“Bird”, an acrobatic film and clash of opposites

There are sometimes phantasmagorical and aerial dreams, real holes in the free and pure air of our sleeping minds, the awakening of which tears us away suddenly, without hope of return. It happens that we try to return there, to rediscover a little of this enchanting elsewhere, while the realism of everyday life, of everyday life, of the imperatives of modern life, ultimately not so far from that of the XIX^e century, continues to gain ground. It is these parallel worlds thatAndrea Arnold brings together in “Bird”, an amazing trip to somewhere else which nevertheless borrows its landscape from that of Kent, where the filmmaker was born, which reinforces the matrix aspect of the project.

This corner of the south-east of England where she chooses to plant her camera, however, is not very exotic. We find a strange family there, a very mature little girl, her older brother and their father covered in tattoos (Barry Keoghan, insane), who looks barely older and is about to marry a young mother he barely knows. “Bird” thus begins as the portrait of a teenage girl in search of independence, in the tradition of “Fish Tank”, which Arnold directed in 2009. Except that the repetition is illusory. The film quickly takes a completely different path than that of the social chronicle towards which it seems to aim, deceiving its audience as well as its heroes, at the same time turning its back on the predictable themes of the adolescent crisis and the story of emancipation.

Waking dream or nightmare

Andrea Arnold, let us be clear, is not making a film against these subjects, nor against this direction. She just develops her fiction in a direction that the first minutes of the film cannot anticipate. Madness, the passage into another world, will emerge two-thirds in with the appearance of a singular character, half-man, half-bird, played by the always surprising Franz Rogowski. The naturalism of the beginning of the film is not evacuated, but transcended by a fantastic element coming straight from the imagination, dream or waking nightmare depending on the point of view.

This marriage is acrobatic. The split it engendered was double-edged. Avoiding the ridiculous as well as the artificial, the film ends up looking like the collusion of two feature films which feed off each other. Naturalism, with its Ken Loach-style aesthetic at the beginning of the film, is treated through fantasy before coming back to the fore, this time under the prism of the most astonishing violence.

“Bird” thus relies on permanent surprise and the organization of chaos that Andrea Arnold seems to manage to perfection. These oscillations in the story also echo a filmography from which any predictability seems excluded. After a stunning first film, “Red Road” was directly selected at Cannes, a psychological drama rocked by the aesthetics of Dogme95 (a movement launched by Lars von Trier) while eyeing Fritz Lang, she had signed the most improbable adaptation of “Wurling Heights”.

Closer to an experimental film than a romantic story, it was in any case confusing, in the good sense of the word. Then she further increased her ambitions by focusing on a micro-society of young marginalized people in “American Honey”, a fake road movie unveiled in Cannes in 2016 but never released in French-speaking Switzerland. Which was also the lot, but it is less surprising, of the documentary “Cow”, which follows the daily life of a cow.

“Bird”, an acrobatic and aerial project, an independent and sepulchral film, a dizzying mise en abyme and bold telescoping of several trends, was part of the 2024 Cannes competition and was one of the shocks. It’s also one of the first big films of 2025.

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