Catherine Called Birdy Movie Storyline : A 14 year old girl in medieval England navigates through life and avoiding potential suitors her father has in mind.
Catherine Called Birdy Movie Review (2022). Girls who simply want to have fun and exercise their fundamental rights have little to no options for entertainment. So thank goodness for Catherine Called Birdy (out in theatres on September 23 and available on Prime Video on October 7), a sly fairytale about a mediaeval tween that manages to be both cheeky and modern without losing its heart, for bringing some genuine fresh air to a genre that too often feels either excessively sanitised or exhaustively market-tested for pop-culture curb appeal.
The sunny, brash only child of the flittering libertine Lord Rollo (Andrew Scott) and his serene wife (Billie Piper), Catherine (Game of Thrones’ Bella Ramsey), or “Birdy,” as she prefers, is a girl who would rather roll around in mud and run free with her best friend Aelis (Metal Lords’ Isis Hainsworth), than be obedient to some porcelain-figurine idea of what However, the good lord is also extremely insolvent, and Birdy is his only real asset. If he can arrange for her to marry a wealthy enough man, they might be able to keep their estate. (Marrying off her cranky older brother, who is also portrayed with amusing pique by fellow Thrones alumni Dean-Charles Chapman, would be helpful, but it won’t pay the rent
Birdy, who is only 14 years old, is heartbroken at the idea of leaving her home and her freedom to become some crusty aristocrat’s child bride. As a result, she dutifully starts to sabotage her prospective suitors, including Russell Brand and a crude barnyard yeti that everyone just refers to as “Shaggy Beard” (Paul Kaye). Rollo is justifiably enraged by her antics, but he still has a soft side and truly adores his disobedient daughter, just like her mother does (“I cheer for you, Birdy, but I fear for you”). Her adored cousin George (Joe Alwyn), who is also struggling to make the most of his engagement to a crazy, much-older widow (Sophie Okonedo), while also developing feelings for Aelis, adds to the complexity.
Birdy’s own endearingly unfiltered point of view, along with confiding voiceovers and winsome, cheerily anachronistic renditions of ’90s alt-pop, relays these serious but largely resolveable difficulties (Mazzy Star, Supergrass). However, what should have been either frenetic or cloying is played with such disarming spunk and verve, it continuously charms (in the vein of the current Renaissance-Kill Bill redux The Princess or Netflix’s winky revisionist remake of Persuasion). Birdy isn’t just an archetype, like the best female protagonists in young-adult literature and film. She is a smart, inquisitive, and delightfully human girl who occasionally loses track of where her moral compass is but rarely does. She freaks out when she gets her period and frequently needs to have her foot surgically removed from her mouth.
Fans of the best-selling YA novel of the same name from 1994, on which Birdy is based, are certainly already aware of that, but some viewers might be startled to learn that Lena Dunham, who also penned the screenplay, was responsible for creating the adaptation. The Girls director and early-aughts lighting rod finds a sweet spot away from the self-centered navel of her Brooklyn-millennial vision in Sharp Stick, in contrast to Sharp Stick, her contemporary “adult” drama about an adolescent woman-sexual child’s awakening released earlier this year.
She appears to be astonishingly at ease in the firelight and tapestries of the thirteenth century, letting her talented performers run wild with the absurdist comedy of the concept — Scott, a.k.a. Fleabag’s former Hot Priest, is an MVP — without reverting to smash-cut pandemonium or tidy moralising. The movie’s somewhat overly adorable tagline, “Old World Problems, New World Attitude,” is accurate: This little bird leans in and learns to fly. Score: B+
Catherine Called Birdy Movie Details
| Release date | October 7, (US) |
| Countries of origin | United Kingdom . United States |
| Language | English |
| Production Companies | Good Thing Going . Working Title Films |