Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
‘Catherine Called Birdy’
It’s entirely fair if you find yourself questioning the filmmaking instincts of Lena Dunham at this point — especially after her unwatchable previous film, “Sharp Stick,” which posited as its protagonist a young autistic woman, seeking sexual fulfillment in the most idiotic ways imaginable — but we can still give her this much. As a storyteller, she has always been very much on top of the physical discomforts of women: Their desires, fears and disappointments, especially when coming to terms with their fledgling womanhood. If you want to make a film about a 14-year-old girl who wants nothing to do with her menstruation cycle — Dunham’s your huckleberry.
Even, it turns out, if that particular 14-year-old, Birdy (Bella Ramsey), lives in the late 13th century, in the era of the crusades. “Catherine Called Birdy” is set in 1290, and as Birdy informs us via saucy voice-over, “in the village of Stonebridge, in the shire of Lincoln, in the country of England,” our heroine is a stroppy sort of young woman, much happier literally playing in the mud than attending to the tediously dull tasks of young womanhood — including yarn spinning, and needlepoint — forced down her gullet by her kindly nanny, Morwenna (Lesley Sharp), on orders from her dear Ma, Lady Aislinn (Billie Piper), and much less appreciated Pa, Lord Rollo (Andrew Scott). Instead, what Birdy likes to do is clown around with her friends, including lowly goat-herder Perkin (Michael Woolfitt), and sweet attendant Meg (Rita Bernard-Shaw), singing songs, and living without a care in the world.
Reality comes harshly, alas, first with the shocked understanding of the acts of physical love (“I’m afraid I’ll perish with revulsion,” she tells the long-suffering Morwenna), then with the bloom of her flower, as it were, an event that eventually leads her father — having discovered to his dismay how his profligate spending has left the family very nearly broke — to seek a wealthy husband with a handsome estate to betrothe his lone daughter.
Only Birdy, whose goofy, free-wheeling ways more or less match a modern day teenager — one of the principle conceits of the film, based on a similarly anachronistic book by Karen Cushman — wants no part of this presumed betrothal, or any sort of thing that doesn’t involve her beloved Uncle
George (Joe Alwyn), recently returned from a Crusade, right up until he takes up with her former best friend, Aelis ( Isis Hainsworth), leaving our heroine very much on her own.
To this point, Birdy has fully enjoyed that golden time before you’ve entered into the adult realm, instead able to stand giggling at the precipice, treating it with all its deserved mockery. Birdy is an irreverent soul, who understandably wants to remain forever out of its clutches (“Being a mother is a terrible job,” she complains), and rankles hard against the oppressive societal rectitudes with which she’s being forced to engage.
To avoid what everyone keeps telling her is inevitable, she employs a series of what she calls “tricks” to stay one step ahead of her father, spoiling every potential courtship he attempts to set up. These episodes, somewhere near the middle of the film, are a comedic high point: With one young man, she dresses like a mad woman with straw for hair; with another, she blacks her teeth out; for yet another, she horribly warbles a song she wrote about a dragon stationed inside a privy. With each successful sabotage, however, she earns more of her father’s increasing wrath, and the growing sense that, try as she might, her fate might well be sealed anyway.
Underneath the film’s more blithe excesses, and Birdy’s spirited rebellion, there is a cold and dark undercurrent: Dunham couches it with her heroine’s fanciful whimsies, but Birdy’s complaint about the lack of agency for women, peasants, and the young, is absolutely, brutally true. It’s not just she who suffers from the social constraints of the time, either: Her beloved Uncle George is forced to abandon his true love, Aelis, in favor of the Countess Ethelfritha (Sophie Okonedo), a wealthy, free-spirited widow, who counsels Birdy to fly away from all this and go on an adventure; and Perkin, her sweet-faced friend, reveals just how much he isn’t allowed to have the type of life he might choose (“I want to be a scholar,” he tells her plaintively, “but I can’t even read”), not to mention his sexual orientation (another hallmark of this version of the middle ages: considerable diversity).
Things are difficult all around, including for her bedraggled father, in a marvelous turn from the always exceptional Scott, who suffers at the thought of giving Birdy away, but worries too about the family he has overspent upon. Caught between a rock and a hard place (even as Birdy points out to him, it is a position of his own construction), Lord Rollo tries to turn Birdy into a human sacrifice, only to have his daughter refuse to play the hand she has been dealt.
It is to the film’s credit that Birdy’s gradual maturation — in which she begins to take in the world outside of her immediate concerns — doesn’t force her to conform to anyone else’s ideal. The choices she does make are ultimately her own, even if they potentially leave her having to marry a profane, elderly codger, she bitterly refers to only as Shaggy Beard (Paul Kaye), who exalts in his carnality, even as the preciously innocent Birdy seeks to find out a working definition of the word “virgin.”
The film is filled with such bittersweet overtones — a raucous scene of Birdy romping around with her friends, with a lively cover of “My Boyfriend’s Back” blasting in the background, is quickly wiped away with another moment of bitter realization when she’s forced to see things through a different prism. It gives the film a slightly schizoid feel, but Dunham, who apparently was a fan of the novel long before her ascendancy on HBO, and who wrote the screenplay, seems to have a great feel for the mood swings of the book, keeping the loose scenes bouncy, and the darker scenes appropriately dour.
Despite its Austen-like thematics, the plot moves a good deal more effortfully, resulting in a few concluding beats that feel more than a little thin, given the previous depth of the characters. It’s acceptable, but less than satisfying. Still, so much of the film is propelled by the effervescent Ramsey, with her fetching underbite and genuinely mischievous, toothy smile, any story shortcomings get pasted over with a dollop of mud and whinnying sort of giggle.