Cannes 2024: What is Bird, the new Andrea Arnold worth? (critical)
For the first time, the filmmaker tinges her social cinema with fantasy. Thanks to this, she creates a vibrant portrait of a 12-year-old girl in search of a better future.
The first minutes of the new Andrea Arnold reveal everything that will follow… while hiding the essentials. This apparent initial paradox is like the film which will gradually conquer us without us necessarily seeing its emotional power coming. Bird is immediately part of the filmmaker's playground: the social chronicle, childhood, the initiatory story and the construction of a child facing absent or failing parents. All to the sound of an impeccable brit-rock soundtrack wonderfully accompanying each movement of this story. The heroine here is called Bailey. She is 12 years old and lives with her brother and father who are raising them in a squat in north Kent. The paterfamilias is about to marry a young woman he met a few days earlier and intends to make his fortune… thanks to a toad from Colorado who spits out hallucinogenic slime when he hears Coldplay's Yellow (yes, yes, you read that right!) . In short: Bailey is in a way the little sister of the heroine of Fish tank, the film that revealed Arnold 15 years ago. However, no feeling of déjà vu. Like the great filmmakers, Arnold basically only plows this furrow where she excels through her ability to direct young talents (in this case the flamboyant Nykia Adams), to become one with her heroines (her moving camera embraces the impulses by Bailey) but also by his way of never enclosing his story in the sordid – evidenced by the very intelligent treatment of the father, never overwhelmed because he seeks to do the best he can and brilliantly portrayed by Barry Keoghan.
It is therefore the movement, the energy, which characterizes the cinema of Andrea Arnold and particularly this film. Once the situation is established, the filmmaker observes this child who, as puberty approaches, seeks to escape social and family determinism. First alone, bumping into walls, then accompanied by an enigmatic character who tumbles into her life, the famous Bird of the title. With his petticoat and his unique phrasing, he reminds us of an angel fallen from heaven or of a superhero who has lost his superpowers. Who could tell at first glance if he is real or if he is an imaginary friend that Bailey invents? In any case, he is the only one to see her as she is, to understand what she wants and to want to support each of her movements towards greater freedom. And it is precisely thanks to Bird… that Bird takes off, as Andrea Arnold leaves her comfort zone to venture for the first time into the realm of fantasy, coming to dialogue with a certain Animal Kingdom that we discovered here exactly a year ago. We would be remiss if we were to spoil things more as the surprise effect contributes to the way in which this film draws you in and takes you far from what you might have anticipated, by daring melodrama without at any time flirting with sentimentality. We will just say that this trip would not have been the same without Bird's interpreter, Franz Rogowski, whose freedom of play, whose poetry surrounds each of his gestures or his looks, and whose way of speaking expressing symbolizes the gentle madness of this character. Few actors would have been capable of it. Andrea Arnold's talent is also this: knowing how to find and direct the right actor in the right place.
By Andrea Arnold. With Nykiya Adams, Barry Keoghan, Franz Rogowski… Duration: 1h59. Undetermined exit.
