Bird (Movie)

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    ‘Bird’ Review: In Search of Safety

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    Barry Keoghan and Franz Rogowski star in a film about a preteen girl who longs for a stability she’s never experienced.Good parents are a rarity in Andrea Arnold’s movies. Instead, they tend to be neglectful and preoccupied, often for solid reasons: Arnold tells stories of working-class families, mostly British, mostly struggling to get by, mostly the offspring of parents who are, themselves, distracted and uninterested in their children’s lives. An early short film of Arnold’s, “Wasp,” has a mother locking her four children in the car while she tries to woo an old boyfriend in a bar. One of her best movies, “Fish Tank,” features a mother who punishes her daughter by telling her she should have gone through with her planned abortion instead of giving birth. The situation is pretty grim.By those standards, Bug (Barry Keoghan, covered in insect tattoos and grins) is a pretty good dad, if only because he talks to his kids. He has two of them, Hunter (Jason Buda) and Bailey (Nykiya Adams), and they live with him in a chaotic, ramshackle squat in northern Kent. Hunter is 14, born when Bug himself was 14; Bailey is 12, and getting fed up with her life. Her own mother (Jasmine Jobson) lives in another house with Bailey’s three stepsiblings.“Bird,” which Arnold wrote and directed, is really Bailey’s story, but Bug is a key part of it. At the start of the film, he brings home a toad in a plastic shopping bag. Bailey wrinkles her nose as he explains that the toad secretes a hallucinogenic, and all they have to do is get it to secrete the drug and then sell it and then, presto, they’ll be rich! He needs the money to live, but also because, he tells her, he’s getting married this weekend.Bailey is having none of Bug’s nonsense, but she doesn’t really know what to replace it with. She has no reference point for a different life and neither, you get the sense, does Bug. “Bird” is the story of children raising children. The complete absence of anything resembling structure is normal to them, but the feeling that the grown-ups are not really acting like grown-ups — that abuses and harms in their community are going unchecked — has gotten to the teenagers. Hunter has joined a gang of young teenage boys who call themselves “vigilantes” and will beat up a man, for instance, if he is abusing his girl.Bailey is on the verge of puberty, and waffling between anger and depression. One day, she meets a strange man who introduces himself as Bird (Franz Rogowski). He seems different from other adults, nonthreatening and quiet and gentle. Bailey only knows how to be abrasive, but she softens toward him, and they become friends. Where did Bird come from? Why is he here? She doesn’t know, and doesn’t care all that much: To her, he represents safety, though she is not sure why.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      At the Cannes Film Festival, Discoveries From Andrea Arnold and Rungano Nyoni

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      Though the history-inflected “Furiosa” and “Megalopolis” were the hottest tickets, films by Andrea Arnold and Rungano Nyoni proved to be discoveries.It must say something about the anxious state of the movie world that two of the hottest tickets at this year’s Cannes Film Festival draw inspiration from ancient Rome. In George Miller’s “Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga,” Chris Hemsworth zips around a wasteland like a heavy-metal charioteer, while in Francis Ford Coppola’s “Megalopolis,” Adam Driver plays a guy named Cesar. That each movie offers a vision of a culture in decline seems too on the nose for this festival, where attendees celebrate the art amid nervous chatter about the state of the industry.This year’s festival opened Tuesday under gray skies, as if nature itself were mirroring all the gloom and doom. Yet while the opening-night movie, the unfunny French comedy “The Second Act,” was a dud, the hourlong ceremony that preceded it was unexpectedly touching. The show’s focus on women that night was instructive, and it suggested that Cannes, a festival that has long promoted the cult of the male auteur, is trying to do a better job of righting a historical gender imbalance. Mind you, the number of female filmmakers who get a chance to strut the red carpet remains low: There are only four in the main competition.Louis Garrel, left, and Vincent Lindon in “The Second Act,” from Quentin Dupieux.Chi-Fou-Mi/Arte France CinémaYet things do seem better here, and at least the festival is keen to show its support for women filmmakers. During the ceremony, which was hosted by the French actress Camille Cottin (“Call My Agent”), an emotional Juliette Binoche presented Meryl Streep with an honorary Palme d’Or, and the festival went bonkers over Greta Gerwig. She’s heading this year’s competition jury, which includes two other women filmmakers: the Turkish screenwriter Ebru Ceylan and the Lebanese director Nadine Labaki. When it came time for Gerwig to appear, the festival played a highlight reel of her work and, in giant letters beamed on an even more giant screen, announced that she had “conquered the world in three films.”It was corny, but, reader, I teared up. Among other things, the love for Streep and Gerwig was a break from the drumbeat of bad news about the American movie business. Heading into 2023, Variety had predicted an “extremely bumpy” year for Hollywood; 12 months later, it changed the diagnosis to “rocky” and a conveniently concise headline explained why. “Strikes, Box-Office Bombs and ‘Huge Leadership Vacuum’: Hollywood Says Goodbye to Worst Year in a Generation.” Even Jerry Seinfeld, in an interview with GQ, said “the movie business is over.” I’d already booked my Cannes hotel and flight, so I went anyway.That’s because while the American entertainment business is in the midst of another of its recurrent crises, this hasn’t stopped artists around the world from making movies. The festival as well as several other programs outside the official selection are presenting more than 100 new movies this year from celebrated veterans and untested directors alike, some who may soon dazzle us. In other rooms in and around the Palais — the hulking center where I spend most of my time here sitting in the dark — an estimated 14,000 industry representatives, including buyers and sellers, have some 4,000 finished movies and projects on the table in what is the world’s biggest international film market.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More