Catherine Called Birdy

Catherine Called Birdy

A teenage girl in Medieval England navigates life and tries to avoid the arranged marriages her father maps out for her.

  • Released: 2022-09-23
  • Runtime: 108 minutes
  • Genre: Adventure, Comedy
  • Stars: Bella Ramsey, Billie Piper, Andrew Scott, Lesley Sharp, Joe Alwyn, Sophie Okonedo, Paul Kaye, Dean-Charles Chapman, Isis Hainsworth, Archie Renaux, Michael Woolfitt, David Bradley, Mimi Ndiweni, Ralph Ineson, Rita Bernard-Shaw, Jake Middleton Cooke, Adam Aziz, Saskia Chana, Jamie Demetriou, Akemnji Ndifornyen, Russell Brand, Christophe Tek, Angus Wright, Jacob Avery, Douggie McMeekin, Lawrence Hodgson-Mullings, Bola Latunji, Jessica Ellis, Jordan Adene, Tyler Howitt, Jeffery Kissoon, Moya Brady, Ramesh Nair, Antony Bunsee, Tim Bevan, Colin Murtagh, Volenté Lloyd, Trevor Jones, Chris Ecob
  • Director: Lena Dunham
 Comments
  • ReadingFilm - 6 January 2023
    No
    It has a lot of things but you feel nothing. The work of a shallow filmmaker. Compare to the soul of Sofia Copola's Marie Antoinette which it tries to emulate. Compare to the wit of The Little Ones, for a comic director it is consistently one note. Only Andrew Scott is good. Actors with gravitas sell the entire movie bigger. This is a problem with comedic worlds; when everyone is ridiculous nothing is funny. It needed brutal realism to contrast to make it funny. To make it emotional. The medieval comedy is a canvas that feels fresh especially with modern cinematography conventions. So I was rooting for it. I liked Tiny Furniture. That decade in television rubbed off on Dunham and the film lacks in the cinema. A different edit might have saved it, I grew tired of reading text on screen. Lastly, the forced diversity, it's over the top and insane. I like the one sassy wife, very funny, but every other scene is jarringly anachronistic in medieval europe. The whole film is ultimately counterfeit, other degrees of the millennial counterfeit, it fails in the same way as her whole generation of directors fail. Dunham, coming from extreme privilege, is too comfortable with her voice and refuses to give the film any stakes or any danger because she is committed to the religiosity of political correctness.
  • JBLOSS - 31 October 2022
    Should've been a whole lot better
    I haven't read the book but hopefully it has a plot that makes more sense than the film. The ending is so contrived to end happily that it seems to forget about everything that has gone before. The film has a good cast but frankly Birdy is pretty annoying and lacks a lot of charm and perhaps there were a couple of small laughs during the movie but I don't think I'd regard it as a comedy. It was more a lighthearted drama that also bears little or no resemblance to medieval reality....was that really a bicycle in Birdy's room at the end?! The themes were also hit and miss...why reference the Crusades without actually putting them a bit into context - the horror, the butchery, the religious intolerance - they were presented as some romantic endeavour. It didn't sit well when the film clearly wanted to make some points about inequalities and people's position in society. At best it's whimsical nonsense.