(First published by Headstuff.org)

 

Bird (dir. Andrea Arnold, 2024)

 

When director Emerald Fennell announced earlier this year that she was planning an adaptation of Wuthering Heights – to star Margot Robie and Jacob Elordi – the critical response ranged from mild curiosity to barely contained exasperation. Regardless of whatever merits it may end up having, Fennell's version is unlikely to match the gusting power of Andrea Arnold's 2011 interpretation, with its pained awareness of the feral energies and social fissures that make Bronte's doom-haunted novel so compulsive. 

 

Bird, Arnold's latest venture, is likewise filled with the violence and vulnerability of hemmed-in people, for whom love and hate are ferociously tangled, and fate, in the form of poverty and misogyny, skews the course of human lives. Nature, too, is always close by: the roaring wind, the soft, creaturely presence of animals (horses, seagulls, dogs, moths), the rhythm of daylight, all inflect Arnold's depiction of her characters and the run-down spaces they inhabit.  

 

Newcomer Nykiya Adams gives one of the year's great on-screen performances as Bailey, a street-savvy, emotionally perceptive young girl, who lives in a run-down squat in Kent with her half-brother, Hunter (Jason Buda), and wayward father, Bug (Barry Keoghan). Bug, as Bailey discovers, is about to get married to a woman his children have never met. Meanwhile, an eccentric, rather aquiline stranger has appeared in the fields that fringe the townland, claiming – despite his German accent – to have grown up in the estate overlooking Bailey's home. 

 

As the pretext might suggest, Bird is, in the main, a coming-of-age story, and to that extent, a fitting follow-up to Arnold's previous features, American Honey (2016) and Fish Tank (2011), both of which delve into the rough-and-tumble hardships of young women attempting to understand or escape from troubled situations. Bird follows a similar trajectory, ably navigated by Arnold herself, who avoids cinematic moralism while remaining faithful and sympathetic to Bailey, as she strives to unriddle the harsh mysteries of the complicated, not-always-benevolent adults who surround her.

 

It's telling that among all the cast-members, Barry Keoghan and Franz Rogowski – both now regarded superstars of independent cinema – are the weakest of the troupe, delivering stilted performances in roles that feel, as the film progresses, oddly superfluous: distractions from the otherwise primal drama of Bailey on the move. Correspondingly, the flashes of magic realism that punctuate the narrative don't quite fit with the grainy immediacy of the whole. Rogowski's title-character, in other words, remains an anachronism, and the same may be said of the sub-plots his arrival generates. Arnold is at her most convincing when observing the mounting struggles of her people up-close, without fantastical filters. 

 

Fresh from playing Jaq in Ronan Bennett's Top Boy (2011-2013), Jasmine Jobson, unsurprisingly, is superb as Peyton, Bailey's semi-estranged mother. That she has so little to work with, and such a short amount of screen-time, is a pitfall of Arnold's script, which prefers to examine the various volatilities of the men and boys who shadow Bailey's world (none of whom, frankly, are as interesting as Peyton could have been). All the same, and as was also true of Arnold's Fish Tank (2009) – which may, in the long run, prove to be the more cohesive film – Bird is never less than absorbing in the attention it brings to women and their daughters as they endure the daily round, which is often brutal. In one affecting scene, Bailey, afraid to disturb her father, tentatively asks her future step-mum (Frankie Box) for tampons, the tension and hostility between them dissipating as the older woman immediately knows what to say and do, reassuring her.  In another, the twelve-year-old attempts, at her own peril, to protect her mother and younger half-siblings from Peyton's abusive boyfriend: a reminder that there are moments in Bailey's life when the only goal is physical survival.

 

Despite its patchiness, Arnold's film has a captivating force. For her, music is where the unspeakable finds voice; the songs her characters dance to become the poetry of their days, granting their dreams and heartaches an otherwise unavailable release. With its hypnotic central performance and pummelling soundtrack (featuring Fontaines D.C. and Gemma Dunleavy, among others), Bird carries us on a journey through the edgelands, where reality sometimes feels “too real” to bear. A memorable social portrait, from a major director.

 

 

The Many Lives of Édouard Louis (dir. François Caillat, 2023)

 

Almost exactly six years ago the French gilets jaunes movement erupted, drawing global attention to the austerity and deepening levels of inequality that had accompanied president Emmanuel Macron's time in office. Punitive displays of police violence followed, as well as a bitterly polarised national debate as to the legitimacy of the demonstrations. Writer Édouard Louis was one of a small cohort of cultural celebrities at the time to express whole-hearted support for the protestors (Pamela Anderson, then resident in France, was another). 

 

Documentary director François Caillat has made Louis the subject of his latest film, placing interviews with Louis alongside dramatic adaptations of his work. Born as Eddy Belleguele in a small village in northern France “where, until the 1980s, a factory employed almost everyone there”, as a young teenager the author won a scholarship to a boarding school in Amiens, an experience of social dislocation that nevertheless marked “a new beginning” for the way he thought about class and identity. Since his best-selling, semi-autobiographical first novel was published in 2014, Louis has enjoyed a cultural visibility (and a degree of material security) rarely afforded to fellow members of the French working class, whom he has continued to write about: the communities left behind by a succession of slickly neoliberal governments apparently intent on eroding labour rights and welfare benefits. 

 

At the core of Louis's work is the desire, in his words, “to create a new language for the left”: a language stripped of sentimental or sanctimonious conceptions of progressive struggle, drawing instead on the realities and tensions of proletarian lives. Despite the soft-voiced sensitivity of his presentation, there's a steely assurance to Louis and an anger to his words. He cares deeply about his people, and resents the various snobberies and divisions that have kept them in their place. While firmly interested in liberatory traditions, he rejects the kind of “freedom” that makes people solely responsible “for what they are, for their own misfortune and their own poverty.” Inequality works on a larger canvas.  Recalling childhood memories of his father, for example, Louis speculates that the “obsession with masculinity in the working class”, the need to be seen as tough and indomitable, a patriarch, was in fact “the result of social domination, of our bodies being all we had.” Academic leftists who refuse to recognise this, he implies, ultimately do more harm than good in their efforts at movement-building.

 

Louis – who sometimes strikes a balletic pose, jokingly, between interviews – emphasises the physical dimension of poverty and economic hardship. “At my parents' house we didn't dine”, he says, “we ate.” Food was a matter of sustenance, each meal a physiological necessity. By contrast, for what he calls “the dominant class”, each meal is socially coded, an occasion for performance and cultural exchange: a “ceremony” reinforcing the status of host and guests alike. Everything is political. When he speaks of “the collective power of autobiography” – in a manner recalling the work of his compatriot, Annie Ernaux – he is arguing for a style of writing that will be both democratic and subversive. A single history, honestly recorded, he suggests, can be a means of bringing an entire class, demeaned and disregarded, into the light. 

 

As such excerpts suggest, Louis is an eloquent interviewee, and Caillat has the good sense to allow him room to ramble as he explores his thoughts and formulates his responses. Some of these, it should be said, are less interesting than others. Although he would no doubt reject the distinction, Louis is arguably more engaging in his political critiques than in his personal self-examinations, which rest a little too earnestly on the minute, neurotic re-description of various adolescent experiences and emotions – a habit that occasionally becomes tiresome. That he wishes to honour, blame, forgive, apologise to, and receive validation from his parents, all at once, isn't in any obvious way symptomatic of his social background – as the film insinuates – nor is it a quandary that necessarily should concern his audience. Louis's insistence to the contrary seems like a youthful (and rather French) extravagance. 

 

However, in his exposé of the Macronite political order – with its brazen elitism and insidious hierarchies, mutilating the lives and bodies of working people – Louis is a radical voice for the age. We listen to him and realise, with the shock of intimate understanding, that the changes he envisions, the transformations he yearns for, could reinvent our world, for one and for all. This film has the virtue of recording the demand.

 

 

The 400 Blows (dir. François Truffaut, 1959)

 

The late Roger Ebert regarded The 400 Blows (1959) as “one of the most intensely touching stories ever made about a young adolescent.” The semi-autobiographical debut feature by François Truffaut, it was one of the founding films of the French New Wave – that edgy, drifting moment of rupture and rebellious chic – and marked Truffaut's own transition from eloquent enthusiast to influential creator. Sixty-five years after its first premiere, it still has the freshness and (as Ebert suggested) youthful vitality of a new departure. 

 

Jean-Pierre Léaud plays Antoine, a quietly unruly teenager, who enjoys mitching off school and sneaking into movie theatres with his friend René (Patrick Auffay), richer than Antoine but equally ignored by his estranged parents. Closely modelled on the director's younger self, Antoine is roguish and likeable, a smart kid with an instinct for fun and a compulsion to be free. Truffaut's genius lies in his unflagging identification with both elements of Antoine's character: his zest and humour, as well as his claustrophobic feeling of captivity and isolation. 

 

Misunderstood and apparently unwanted by his mother and her partner, Antoine, despite his reputation for mischief and subversion, is a diligent son: he sets and tidies the kitchen table daily, empties the rubbish bins, does his own homework, and knows when to steer clear of the permanently distracted grown-ups he lives with. He has trouble sleeping – and keeping warm at night, in his frugal surroundings – but is accustomed to pretending that all his well. “School”, meanwhile, as Robert Ingram notes, “is presented more as a prison than a place of learning.” Antoine's class-teacher is harsh and punitive, a bore who forces his pupils to recite florid poetic verses, while remaining impervious to the creativity of his young charges (in his spare time, Antoine worships Balzac and writes scurrilous literary works of his own).

 

Although only 90 minutes long, as a personal portrait The 400 Blows feels expansive and authentic. Truffaut delights in cataloguing the joyous rituals of felonious boyhood: the white lies and petty thefts, the acrobatic escapades, without which – as we come to see – life would be authoritarian and dull. But the affection Truffaut bestows on Antoine also has a social charge. In his roaming, intuitive style, often feeling closer to documentary than fiction, he seems to be clearing a space for the unloved and abandoned, including the drunks and sex workers with whom Antoine, at one point, shares a holding cell in the local police station. When the renegade eventually flees from the correctional academy he has been sent to, his escape seems like an act of courage and integrity, albeit cloaked in childish wonder. Throughout the film, seeing the world (the streets of Paris, and later, the coast of Normandy) from Antoine's perspective is never less than magical, even as his desperation grows.

 

In the famous, final scene, Antoine – on the cusp of adolescence and at edge of sea and land, unable to run any farther – turns and stares directly into the eyes of the audience. Truffaut orchestrated this shot as a homage to Ingmar Berman's Summer with Monika (1953), but it may also mirror John Ford's iconic introduction of “The Ringo Kid” in Stagecoach (1939), the picture that made John Wayne a star. As the camera zooms in on his soft, defiant features, we realise that Antoine, too – boyish and combative, an outcast – has become a cinematic hero. Notwithstanding whatever neorealist impulses may have informed Truffaut's portrait of a truant teenager, the film retains an almost spiritual belief in the transformative power of cinema to convert loneliness and alienation into a kind of love. By the end, we look at Antoine and see ourselves. Truffaut's empathy has changed our lives.