‘Bird’ review: Fantasy as a cure for pain

Manager: Andrea Arnold.

Distribution: Nykiya Adams, Barry Keoghan, Franz Rogowski, Jasmine Jobson, Jason Buda, Kirsty J. Curtis and James Nelson-Joyce.

Premiere: 29.11.24

Punctuation: ★★★★

Andrea Arnold ‘revived’bird‘life in english suburbsThis time we focus on childhood. Her new film is both a portrait of a community and a coming-of-age story with a very distinct protagonist: Bailey (newcomer Nykiya Adams), a 12-year-old girl living with her father, surviving as a young man. at his best and his brother in an environment steeped in violence and also familiar with it.

The filmmaker does something very difficult here, as he did in ‘Fish Tank’ (2009): Without moralizing, talk about lives on the margins, limited by necessity and violencecompassion or judgment. Just observe from the right distance, a brutal exercise in understanding the characters. ‘The Bird’ feels alive because these characters flow without anyone conditioning them with their gaze. From there, in addition to depicting a place and creating an unusual character, Arnold expresses something that is very difficult to translate into images: I want to escape a place and certainty belongs to him. He does this through the character Bird, played by the great actor who gave the film its name. Franz Rogowski. As the director of the film ‘American Honey’ (2016) consciously takes his first step into fantasy, he delves into fantasy in a way that is as poignant as it is fantastic, ensuring its fusion and mixing with reality and talking about it as a possible picture. your salvation when reality presses too much.