Miraculous things happen in this drama about 12-year-old Bailey, who is growing up in small-town England. Andrea Arnold’s film was featured in the competition at the 77th Cannes Film Festival.
The wind blows noisily as a screeching bird circles in the gray sky. Bailey (Nykiya Adams in her debut role) holds a phone with a cracked screen with both hands and points the camera at the bird, trying to keep the wire mesh bridge out of the frame. Bailey films everything that makes up her everyday life: graffiti on the walls of the squat where she lives with her party-going young father (Barry Keoghan), a sleepy fly on the window overlooking the docks, her elder brother and his girlfriend in their shared room. When she meets an eccentric man named Bird (Franz Rogowski), she starts filming too, just in case. Bird says he’s looking for his parents, who used to live in one of the five-story buildings in the neighborhood. Overcoming her distrust, Bailey decides to help him.
Bailey is the latest addition to the sequence of Arnold’s female protagonists growing up in an unsafe environment overshadowed by a strong male presence. The teenage girl’s wariness, boredom, and anger at the lack of autonomy give weight to literally every scene with her participation. Bird is close to Arnold’s earlier, social realist works Fish Tank and the Oscar-winning short Wasp, where the action, as in Bird, takes place in the south of England, in Kent. Being from Kent herself, Arnold shows the world of cheap housing, litter, addictions, and early pregnancies with deep empathy and tenderness toward people from a socially disadvantaged background. The new element for Arnold is the motif of the miraculous, of materialized fantasy. The key question of the film is who—or what—Bird is.
The film will be screened in English with Russian subtitles.
Bird
Director: Andrea Arnold
UK, USA, France, Germany, 2024. 119 min.
18+
