You have to see how little Andrea Arnold does in cinema – only five fiction feature films in a 25-year career – and how good her films are. And you have to see how well he uses songs in his films: for dramatic and narrative, poetic purposes, most of the time in a diegetic way, not as simple playlists of hits to shock the viewer.
From the times of ‘Red Road’ (2006), with ‘Morning Glory’ (Oasis) and ‘Love Will Tear Us Apart’ (Joy Division), to the musical apotheosis that was ‘American Honey’ (2016), with priceless moments to the sound of ‘We Found Love’ (Rihanna), ‘Dream Baby Dream’ (Bruce Springsteen) or ‘American Honey’ (Lady Antebellum), the director has always used songs and dances as a fundamental stylistic resource in his cinema. In fact, he has once said that he always brings a speaker to filming to play music and that he prepares playlists for each actor as a tool to prepare for their character.
In ‘Bird’, the songs say as much about the characters and the social context in which they move as any dialogue, setting detail or purely visual scene. Burial’s music and songs like ‘The Universal’ (Blur), ‘Lucky Man’ (The Verve) or Coldplay’s ‘Yellow’ (in one of the greatest cinematic moments of the year), provide the film with dramatic and psychological depth. extraordinary. The songs of Fontaines DC deserve special mention, whose guitarist Carlos O’Connell makes a cameo. In particular, songs like ‘Too Real’ or ‘A Hero’s Death’ are so well integrated into the narrative that they seem written expressly for the film.
The protagonist of ‘Bird’ is the typical heroine of Arnold’s films: a 12-year-old girl who tries to survive in a hostile environment, in a neighborhood of Kent, southeast of London, marked by poverty, violence and family breakdown. . But, far from wallowing in misery or making a facile denunciation of the alarming inequality that exists in the country, the director opts for a very harsh coming of age but full of human warmth, crossed by a fantastic element that serves as a beautiful lyrical and counterpoint. call to hope.
With a superlative trio of actors – Barry Keoghan (‘Saltburn’, ‘The Banshee of Inisherin’), Franz Rogowski (‘Disco Boy’, ‘Passages’) and newcomer Nykiya Adams – ‘Bird’ is presented as an example of cinema thematically and stylistically anchored in the harshest reality (the film follows the visual coordinates of naturalistic cinema with a lot of hand-held cameras and nervous editing), but that is not afraid to take flight towards narrative territories as surprising as they are risky. Arnold places his film on the wire and balances it like a bird perched on a power line.
