Once described (mostly by herself) as the voice of the millennials, writer-director Lena Dunham was effectively cancelled by Gen Z within 10 years of first making that claim. In those 10 years, Dunham has gone from being one of the most interesting new filmmakers in the American independent scene to becoming something of a television power-player to landing herself in regular trouble for her tone-deaf public statements — the latest of which she made as recently as last week.
It took Dunham over a decade to direct a follow-up to her debut feature, the Sundance hit Tiny Furniture, and now, she has another film up for release. But the period comedy Catherine Called Birdy — pun totally not intended, but utterly appropriate — isn’t at all like the divisive, and frankly icky Sharp Stick, which was shot in secret and released only a few months ago. Based on a children’s novel by Karen Cushman, Catherine Called Birdy, the film is a medieval comedy whose titular teenage heroine must battle growing pains and the possibility of a grim future when her father decides to barter her in exchange of social mobility.
Bella Ramsey stars as the perpetually conflicted heroine, torn between the responsibility that comes with being called ‘Lady’ Catherine, and the fast-disappearing childhood that she would’ve liked to enjoy more of as the carefree Birdy. Although the novel was published back in the 90s, the film is very much an extension of the Fleabag school of feminism popularised by Phoebe Waller-Bridge — to the extent that it counts the Hot Priest himself among its cast.
Andrew Scott plays Birdy’s status-obsessed father as a wastrel among men, casually squatting on inherited land and coasting by on entitlement alone. Bored silly (and practically penniless), he purchases a tiger for his amusement, which arrives — dead — on his doorstep many months later, presumably damaged during shipping. Of course, she’s constantly at odds with him. Birdy is unable to digest why he’d be willing to get her married to a dirty old man, just to preserve his own pride and collect a fat dowry in exchange. The film is perhaps designed as an exaggerated metaphor for how poorly women are treated, but in some cultures — including our own — it could practically play like a documentary.
Indian Matchmaking has disrobed some of our most shameful truths before the entire world. And like Birdy, who eventually resigns to her fate, women in India — and, I’m sure, in many other countries across the world — agree to participate in archaic traditions simply because they’ve been told that these are the ways of the world.
But when Birdy isn’t raging against the man, she has raging hormones to contend with. In the throes of puberty, she thirsts after her dashing uncle George, played by Mr Taylor Swift Joe Alwyn, and imagines the monks at the local monastery to all be hot — like members of a boy band manufactured by Simon Cowell himself.
Dunham infuses the period setting with a soundtrack transported directly from her iPhone, but like the whole Fleabag thing — which has been aped in not just the Enola Holmes movies, but also the recent Persuasion — this has been done many times before, perhaps most notably by Sofia Coppola in Marie Antoinette. But if Coppola’s film reimagined the French queen as a Valley Girl who just wanted to par-tay, Dunham presents Birdy almost like a version of Hannah Horvath from her seminal HBO series Girls — a complex concoction of white privilege and patriarchal oppression.
It seems like in the decade since Tiny Furniture, Dunham’s ‘voice of a generation’ persona has allowed — either willingly or by mandate — the voices of other women to take precedence over her own. Catherine Called Birdy is as much a product of the industry-wide changes that people like Waller-Bridge and Shonda Rhimes have introduced as it is a ‘New Lena Dunham Movie’. And in the end, that’s for the best.
Catherine Called Birdy
Director – Lena Dunham
Cast – Bella Ramsey, Andrew Soctt, Joe Alwyn, Billie Piper
Rating – 3/5
