Bird | Strange bird | The Press

Bailey, 12, lives with his brother Hunter and his father Bug, who raises them alone in a squat in Kent, England. Bug has little time to spend with his children and Bailey, who is approaching puberty, looks elsewhere for adventure.

Bird by British director Andrea Arnold is a coming-of-age story in the vein of the social realism of her short films Milk, Dog et Wasp – which earned him an Oscar in 2005 – as well as his excellent feature films Red Road (2006), Fish Tank (2009) et American Honey (2016), all winners of the Cannes Film Festival Jury Prize.

With this film also presented in official competition at Cannes last May, the filmmaker returns to fiction – after the documentary Cow in 2021 – and to inner-city England. It tells the story of a morose preteen, Bailey (Nykiya Adams), who lives with her delinquent father (Barry Keoghan, as captivatingly intense as ever) and her brother Hunter (Jason Buda) in a squat, at the heart of from a small town in the south-east of England.

Bailey meets Bird (Franz Rogowski), a candid young man in search of identity who shakes her out of her torpor. Who is this strange bird, which threatens at any moment to upset the precarious balance in which Bailey finds himself?

Andrea Arnold once again takes an interest in Bird, filmed with a hand-held camera for the most part, getting as close as possible to the characters, to the fate of those left behind in a gripping way, thanks to his acuity and sensitivity. It’s a film where we find touches of his filmography, like this scene with drug dealers which evokes the short film Dog. But above all, this desire to give a voice to those who do not have one, who are invisible or despised by the rest of society.

The music, always at the heart of his work, varies this time from rap to dad rock via techno and trip-hop, crystallizing so many different atmospheres.

The author-filmmaker also tries her hand at magical realism, in a sequence that made me think of Animal kingdom by Frenchman Thomas Cailley. If the transplant doesn’t quite take off, it doesn’t prevent Andrea Arnold from adding a new stone, charming and intriguing, to her filmography.