Catherine Called Birdy

dir: Lena Dunham

2022

I don’t know who this exists for, or how it came to exist. It is an unusual thing.

The biggest surprise for me is that Lena Dunham directed this, and it’s actually pretty good. That’s not to minimise Dunham’s talent as a writer or a director: I think she’s quite accomplished at both. It’s just that when you think of a story set in England in the 13th century, you don’t immediately think of Brooklyn’s finest as being the best fit for the material.

Which would be (on my part) a weak and unjustifiable set of assumptions. If nothing else Dunham has made a career of working out through art (and in public) what it means to be a woman in this contemporary world, and as such I guess it’s not that strange that the coming-of-age of her young ladyship at a time when women had even less rights now than the average woman in a Southern American state is a story she has ideas about.

The surprise, if it is one, is that her ideas, feminist or otherwise, are good ones, and serve the story well.

It helps to have a solid performer in the lead role. This isn’t going to mean a lot to people who didn’t watch Game of Thrones, but anyway – that show had a lot of memorable performances from a whole bunch of people, but easily one of the greatest characters and most on point casting decisions was getting Bella Ramsey (with a name like that she already sounds like a GoT character) to play the Lady Lyanna Mormont, head of her house at only the age of 10.

The ”joke”, such as it was, was when people would speak to her, they thought they were talking to a child, but a few choice and pointed words from her would disabuse people of that notion forthwith. This absolute badass would shame men 40 years her senior that lacked even a tenth of her fierceness or her courage, and the way her character leaves this world at the Battle of Winterfell still has me in awe.

The character of Lady Catherine, or Birdy, as she prefers to be known, is not as fearsome, but is just as wilful and determined to get her way. Unfortunately for her, her character isn’t in an epic fantasy series, so she’s not in a world in which a powerful young woman can transcend the strictures of her society with a sharp sword and through sheer force of will.

She is, instead, the daughter of a minor noble, in the town of Stonebridge, and she is of marrying age, meaning she is 14.

Eww. Anyway, while this society and all the people around her keep saying she’s ready for marriage and the bearing of children, she strongly disagrees. She sees her mother, the dear Lady Aislinn (Billie Piper), near death several times in the attempt to bear more children than she’s already borne (and, with 3 living kids, she has seen many more buried), and all this palaver is not something she yet wants to understand.

Her thoughts on how procreation occurs strongly indicates that life on a farm has taught her nothing about the ways of animals, be they human or barnyard, but that’s okay. The movie clearly indicates that, for her time and place, Birdy’s ignorance is a bit unusual but not unexpected.

Birdy is defined (when she’s not sharing all her thoughts and feelings to us in voice over, which is meant to be like her journal, written to an older brother who happens to be a monk) by her energy, which is irrepressible, and her relationships with the people around her. She is probably closest to her nurse (Lesley Sharp), with whom she also shares a bed, for some reason (probably cheaper in terms of heating). When her best friend Aelis (Isis Hainsworth) visits, she sleeps on the other side of Nursey, so, everyone’s as snug as bugs in rugs.

She has another peasant friend who’s a milkmaid (Rita Bernard-Shaw) and Goat Boy Perkin (Michael Woolfit) as well, so she’s down with the commonfolk. But her dad Sir Rollo (Andrew Scott, absurd and great as always) cares not at all for any of that. He just wants to maximise how much he can sell her for in marriage.

So begins a parade of suitors, and of Catherine doing everything she can to shoo them away however she can. Whether they be young men or old (Russell Brand, in an amusing cameo), she finds it pretty easy to change their minds.

Until a terrible man she calls Shaggy Beard (Paul Kaye, who seems like and talks like he’s straight out of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales) decides she’s wonderful just as she is, and her antics are delightful instead of off-putting.

Well, damn, what’s a girl to do. In between dodging suitors and whinging, and setting people / buildings on fire she has the added frustration of having a crush on her Uncle George (Joe Alwyn) who she’s convinced was some hero in the Crusades, but is just a depressed blonde guy with a cool beard, and resentment towards her best friend who also has a crush on George, but is being forced to marry a seven year old duke.

This isn’t really the kind of flick where all this is happening with intrigue or suspense, or a feeling of impending doom. The tone is light and comedic even as we grasp the reality of how brutal these lives were for women especially at a time where few people had any rights whatsoever, let alone as to whether they wanted to be married or not. Almost everyone, including the dad, who seems brutish and dull is given an opportunity to show to Birdy that they love her in their own ways, they can’t do anything about the unfairness of life for the lot of women in general or her specifically, and that they hope she’ll still find some happiness in life before she most likely dies in childbirth.

I really enjoyed the flick and did not mind at all that it leaned far more towards the anachronistic and farcical side of things that the realistic or believable or even remotely historically accurate. They talk of money and such, and it’s all so silly, that issues every character bang on about in terms of Birdy’s duty to save the estate because they have no money (presumably because Sir Rollo is drinking it all, the hot lush that he is), don’t seem to matter at all when they no longer want it to.

When Birdy finds out her beloved mother is pregnant for the 19th time, she screams at her father that the midwife said “this time she may bleed to death”, which was a very serious and common way to die back then. And then when she’s giving birth, and things are getting so grim a priest is called in, the dad starts yelling at people that this time the birth will go fine, and though even his wife despairs, he insists that his love will somehow make up for the lack of a clean environment and no real obstetric medicine to speak of, and that everything will be okay through the sheer force of his love.

Andrew Scott is an actor great enough that he can sell even a moment like this that makes no sense, and when it works, when it has no reason to, I confess I had a tear in my eye, but honestly, come on.

Maybe that’s the overall point – if you want something enough, maybe it’ll happen if you just irritate the universe into going your way, just for once. I can buy it, at least while I’m watching a film so deftly made.

It seems churlish not to recommend the film to people, because, I dunno, were people hoping for movies like A Knight’s Tale again, just without, you know, Heath Ledger, and at a tiny fraction of the budget? All I can really confidently say is that I enjoyed the film a whole heck of a lot and I think Bella Ramsey should get all the roles.

8 times Birdy should have killed a lot of people in this flick, but didn’t out of 10

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“When you try to bend the ways of the world, I will cheer for you, Birdy, but I fear for you.” – every parent’s lament - Catherine Called Birdy