Catherine Called Birdy

With miscalculated dry humor and unfunny banter that delivers so much low energy, filmmaker Lena Dunham burns through her biggest budget to date on her well-intentioned medieval satire titled Catherine Called Bird, an adaptation of the popular 1994 children’s book of the same title. The film takes satiric jabs at medieval patriarchy with its feminist strutting, but the film lacks a subversive quality that never feels combative or even entertaining. The film has great support from its superb lead, Bella Ramsay (Game of Thrones), and while this film has all the markings of being a substantial adaptation, it never fully impresses on a comedic, technical, or even satirical level.

Like Cushman’s highly regarded children’s novel of the same title, the film’s protagonist Catherine (Ramsey), a 14-year-old princess who is nicknamed “Birdy,” ends up being faced with all of medieval England’s patriarchal norms in the 13th century. Mostly episodic with rarely any memorable characters or scenes, each interlude basically consists of her rebellious ways against her father, Lord Rollo (Andrew Scott), who is determined to arrange a marriage for his daughter with someone who can financially provide for her and help pay for the expenses of his estate. Catherine always finds ways to sabotage the best arrangements possible, which she attempts to hold off.

In which you can’t blame Birdy because she hasn’t even truly begun womanhood yet. Birdy begins to have her menstrual cycles, which she hides from her family, and she’s aloof to why they are happening until the court nurse, Morwenna (Lesley Sharp), explains to her that it’s part of womanhood. She certainly keeps this away from her father because her mother, Lady Aislinn (Billie Piper), keeps having miscarriages and stillbirth pregnancies, and this motivates her to stay away from wanting to be a married mother.

Birdy is able to outwit each of the suitors of the arrangement, which is secretly supported by her Uncle George (Joe Alwyn). Yet her wit is eventually mistaken for charm once she is arranged with a wealthy rich man named Shaggy Beard (Paul Kaye), who finds Birdy’s disdain and hard to get wit charming. From there, the structure hits many of the same notes throughout. The film becomes repetitive and most of the humor never lands. Most of the characters in the film come off as underwritten, especially Birdy’s mother, in which Piper and Ramsay aren’t given that exchange or perfect moment in the film to express conflict and opine how they feel in their social standing or setting.

While the elements of being a combative feminist film with razor-sharp wit and hilarious medieval humor aren’t found, the film resorts to tiresome jokes about the setting and medieval wardrobes, as Dunham struggles to find the scope for her elaborate locations and art direction. Sadly, Dunhan never even works on the genre-bending parody antics of Month Python, and her dry execution never reaches the wit and spirit that you would hope for going in. While David Gordon Green’s Your Highness isn’t necessarily a good film, that film at least had a ye olde spirit about it that this film could have easily used.

Catherine Called Birdy, in the end, becomes a disappointment. After being on a 10-year directing hiatus on feature films, Dunham has released two films this year—the other, Sharp Stick, which was released later in the summer, also held some issues, but it was at least mostly engaging. With a film that opens up with Birdy rolling around in a mud fight, Catherine Called Birdy always feels dull throughout. The Birdy character never quite reaches any complexity, and even the coerciveness of her father trying to arrange marriages never holds the suffocating pressure a young woman would find. Dunham has mostly been celebrated in the past for her feminist idealism, but even that comes up short in her third feature, where so many of her ideas feel like simplistic posturing. I feel awful panning both of her films so much this year, but I’m hoping Dunham can return to her quirkier sensibilities that were so effectively utilized in finding in her downbeat indie debut, Tiny Furniture, which put her in the spotlight over a decade ago.