Before Catherine Called Birdy gets started, writer-director Lena Dunham wants you think about Clueless. She overlays the opening scene to the song “Alright,” originally by Supergrass, which was used prominently in Amy Heckerling’s modern update of Emma. This is a cover of “Alright,” not the original version, presumably chosen because it’s more mellow and better reflects the setting. Instead of sunny Los Angeles in the ‘90s, Dunham’s film is set in medieval England, which is another way of saying that Dunham – like Sofia Coppola in Marie Antoinette – relies heavily on anachronism as a cinematic tool. The gambit is smart and successful, a way for Dunham to depict a plucky young protagonist who is not modern, exactly, but whose dreams and desires are similar to what girls share today.
Bella Ramsey, whom you may recognize from Game of Thrones, plays Birdy as a curious, opinionated lord’s daughter. She wants nothing more than to play with her friends and be left alone, so problems arise when her father Lord Rollo (Andrew Scott) starts losing money. Left with no alternative, he decides to marry Birdy to a wealthy lord, and she sabotages him in any way she can. At first, she hides her tampons (or the medieval equivalent) in the outhouse, and then she terrorizes one suitor after another. Over the course of the film, her minor rebellion grows more specific and less superficial. It’s not just that she maintains her childlike impulses; she also grows increasingly aware that being a woman in medieval England is systemically unfair. Her mother (Billie Piper) unintentionally confirms this fact with a series of miscarriages: each pregnancy is a health risk, and while Birdy wants children eventually, her mother is an unintentional warning. Motherhood is the last thing she wants right now.
In Dunham’s hands, this material is never too dour. There is an infectious lightness to Catherine Called Birdy, due largely to Ramsey’s energetic performance, that keeps the material from being too maudlin or reveling in cliches. The best scenes involve Birdy trying to make sense of the world as best she could, even though she lacks the background or education to fully grasp what happens among her growing circle (an early scene, where she describes her notion of sex to an Irish governess, is both childlike and a little obscene). Birdy has a conservative streak, insofar that all children do, because any disruption to their familiar lives feels a little traumatic. She finds it horrifying when her best friend Aelis (Isis Hainsworth) accepts a marriage proposal from her Uncle George (Joe Alwyn) since, in part, that means her world is moving on faster than she wants. The film includes several dubious unions, including one with a nearly 60-year age gap, and Dunham treats them matter-of-factly. We all know patriarchal society is deeply flawed, and this film suggests that the people who lived it found a way to get on, anyway.
Like the use of pop music, Dunham constantly makes choices to make us think about how her film fits alongside its contemporaries. Along with Ramsey, several other former Game of Thrones actors make an appearance here, including Dean-Charles Chapman, Paul Kaye, and Ralph Ineson. But unlike the show, which could be brutal and miserable to a fault, there is a lightness to Dunham’s touch. She wants to critique Birdy’s world with lightness and empathy, leading to several revisionist scenes like a comic duel between Birdy’s father and one of her suitors. Moreover, Birdy has a relaxed kind of storytelling, leaving plenty of room for the characters to breathe and giving the suggestion that what makes her exceptional is not her wit or desire for equality, but something more basic: her refusal to be bored, and a consistent skepticism with what others ask of her. This, along with a deep commitment to her long-suffering, patient family, are more resolute guides than any misguided expectation about how she should be – expectations that haven’t changed that much in 800 years, when you sit down and think about it.
Photo courtesy of Amazon Studios
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