A Wide Range of Subjects

Bird, a film by Andrea Arnold, 2024—where to begin, where to end? Only with amazement and admiration for a film starring a 12-year old black mixed-race girl living in a squat in industrial England with her daft heavily tattooed dad who rides on now of those 2-wheeled scooters and is soon to be re-married, and her slightly older brother; co-starring a frog, an older white guy who she becomes friends with, the older guy who turns into a giant bird near the end of the film! The huge, seemingly endless cast features mostly birds, butterflies, horses, low-life teenagers, the ocean, the 12-year old girl’s battered iPhone she takes pictures on to document her predicament and messages’ her friends. The film captures an almost overwhelming flood of negative and positive life-forces, so improbable but so believable is the imagery—the movement of the film and the movement of its language follows the characters into the violence of both evil and beauty, wonder and love, understanding and bewilderment. The unexpected happens in virtually every scene, often banal, often surprising, then finding some sort of resolution.

“A Wide Range of Subjects”,