Andrea Arnold’s Bird (2024), a MUBI release, is now playing in theaters.
Bird (Andrea Arnold, 2024).
I have good news for those seeking a posthuman perspective on the class system. Andrea Arnold’s Bird (2024) combines a story of economic hardship with one of delicate animal life and sublime metamorphosis. If that sounds silly or trite, it isn’t remotely. The film centers on Bailey (Nykiya Adams), an adolescent living in a poor part of Kent, on the south coast of England, and one of millions of British children forced to endure the worst repercussions of conservative austerity since 2010. Like the characters of Arnold’s other films, such as Mia (Katie Jarvis) in Fish Tank (2009) and Star (Sasha Lane) in American Honey (2016), Bailey is poor, lacking in parental guidance, and as such, both bold and self-destructive. On the face of it, Bailey’s life is one of little hope, but an encounter with the enigmatic Bird (Franz Rogowski) disrupts the cycles of violence and neglect to which the child has become inured. Quiet, unobtrusive, but curious about Bailey, Bird appears one day on the marshlands beyond the suburbs, where decades of disinvestment have allowed the social housing to fall into disrepair.
Bird is not cynical, which marks him out from the other people in Bailey’s life. Except for Bailey’s father, Bug (Barry Keoghan), everyone that Bailey knows is jaded, angry, and exhausted, and with good reason. Bug himself, outside of a romantic relationship that often distracts him from his parental responsibilities, is volatile, susceptible to fits of violence and dependent on a cycle of partying and drugs. His one financial hope resides in selling the psychoactive toxins emitted by a toad that he has purchased, and which he mistreats by keeping in a Tupperware container. Bailey’s mother, Peyton (Jasmine Jobson), long separated from Bug, is in an abusive relationship, her other children neglected and often entrusted to Bailey’s care. From older brother, Hunter (Jason Buda), who is also still only a teenager, Bailey receives a complicated mix of love, social acceptance, and a potentially corrupting exposure to danger. In this dynamic, Arnold’s knack for avoiding moral absolutes is on full display, as is her talent for drawing out the contradictions in human relationships. Bailey meets Bird after fleeing the scene of an assault by Hunter’s group of friends on a local man. There is a tonal shift away from the violence and aggression that seemed to indicate Bailey’s own fate, toward the possibility of something more gentle.
Where Bird is open, Bailey is guarded and suspicious. Where Bird is inquisitive, Bailey is stubborn and sure. Where Bird is prone to tears, outpourings of feeling, and spontaneous fits of dance, Bailey is suspicious of emotion, greeting it with a blank stare or a scowl. This is a survival skill, based on the very accurate assumption that any sign of sensitivity leaves a person susceptible to harm. Even Bailey’s most tender moments prior to meeting Bird are overlaid with an air of indifference. Bird’s clothing defies gender norms; his gestures are fluid and graceful, but his speech can be tough and direct, setting an example for Bailey about what constitutes constructive forms of assertiveness.
Bird (Andrea Arnold, 2024).
Arnold pays homage to Wings of Desire (1987), Wim Wenders’s own story of angelic protection, in scenes that display Bird standing atop a housing block as if watching over Bailey. Here, too, is a comment about the severity of Britain’s poverty crisis, which is comparable to the suffering of those who lived in a forcibly divided Berlin. Let’s not forget that when Philip Alston, the former UN Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights, visited the UK in 2018, he concluded that the coalition government’s policies, which included the Welfare Reform Act and major funding cuts to those services aimed at supporting the most vulnerable in society, had led to the “systematic immiseration of millions across Great Britain.” A spokesperson for UNICEF UK followed up on those findings with a statement, which pointed out that in the year prior, 30 percent of Britain’s children were recorded as living in poverty.
Arnold is not the first director to tackle this subject on film, of course, but she is one of the few to incorporate elements of the surreal. The films of Ken Loach and Mike Leigh have a very important place in the canon of British filmmaking, but in the subsequent vogue for gritty tales of hardship that lack the political rigor of Loach or Leigh, the logic of capitalism often goes unchallenged. By presenting a version of reality in which these issues seem almost inevitable, in which the overriding sentiment is one of worry or sympathy, rather than anger and possibility, we find ourselves at an impasse. The magical, making a breach in that reality, forces us to see our stifled, stymied lives for what they are, setting the imagined alternative front and center.
Bird (Andrea Arnold, 2024).
Bird, in this sense, joins a small but crucial retinue of eccentric saviors and amiable outsiders sent to deliver British children from their misery. Stig of the Dump by Clive King, a staple of the British curriculum since it was published in 1963, tells the story of a prehistoric man who has accidentally stumbled into the modern day; his message is one of humble pleasures and respect for nature, as he shows a boy who is otherwise bored and isolated, how to hunt, scavenge and repair. The title character of David Almond’s 1998 novel Skellig, in which an angel lurks in a family’s private garage, likewise teaches the children who encounter him about care and compassion while their parents are distracted. More political than both of these, Charles Kingsley’s 1863 novel The Water-Babies tells the story of a subaquatic community that welcomes and protects the child victims of the Victorian workhouse. In each case, only a fantastical figure is capable of providing a child access to the love and affection that material conditions in the real world prohibit.
All of these stories, Bird included, are about the crime of an imaginative life cut short. In Arnold’s picture, we find cob horses being ridden by local Romani people, attentive corvids who deliver important memoranda, a toad that is held against its will and extorted for cash, and long grasses that seem to move in some kind of coordinated dance. By the end, we are left with a sense that all of nature, choked by greed, overconsumption, and pollution, is mourning for the likes of Bailey. In shifting the focus from the anthropocentric concerns of financial struggles—food banks, claiming benefits, and feeding kids—there is a reminder in Bird of what has been lost, of what we have become alienated from because of those very struggles.