Andrea Arnold’s films pivot on the arrival of a disarming, charismatic, and chaotic force, someone who in their initial presentation offers the young women at the center of her films an escape, but also possibly damnation. Michael Fassbender’s lithe lecher in Fish Tank, his pants barely held up just above his cock; Shia LaBeouf’s suspendered wild man, dancing at an indifferent checkout in American Honey – men who know how to promise women the world, confident they can get what they’re after before asked to deliver it.
For twelve-year-old Bailey (Nykiya Adams), her chaotic force is a constant. Her dad (Barry Keoghan), called Bug and covered in tattoos befitting the name, disrupts her morning reverie atop his only real companion, his electric scooter, whisking her away back to their small apartment to announce he’s soon to be married. Arnold – once again working from her own screenplay – quickly establishes what will become a routine confrontation between the two, Bug forcefully insisting on a buy-in Bailey stubbornly refuses to allow. The apartment’s barely big enough for the two of them plus her stepbrother Hunter (Jason Buda); hardly room for a new wife with a young daughter of her own. Certainly not when you’re twelve and just starting to find your own way.
Bailey’s own way isn’t much more promising, tagging along with a street gang and hoping to be more formally involved in their semi-regular marauding. When she stalks them one night to a house where all goes to shit, she’s left to sleep in a field, and on waking, encounters a new type of chaotic force for Arnold – something no less destabilizing, but potentially genuinely comforting, nurturing, and inspiring. As Franz Rogowski comes bounding towards her, we’re as suspicious as she. A lone man in a field is rarely a friend to a young girl. But his interest in her is more akin to a child’s than a man; not in a way that suggests disability, but something nearer enlightenment. He says his name is just Bird. A haunting image Arnold returns to – Rogowski standing stoically against the elements, gazing towards the camera – suggests something more ethereal. But for now, Bailey’s world is hardly short on men named for animals; what’s one more.
Arnold’s other frequent subject – the way pop culture encourages the poor to cosplay as wealthy – enables Bailey’s fascination with Bird. This is her adventure, the one she’s been promised. It certainly enables Bug’s certainty in his own charisma to win over anyone. Keoghan, who emerged as a captivating talent playing a series of squirrely oddballs, has of late taken center stage as a sort of lothario all his own. In Bug, he finds an ideal outlet, a guy who can win over any room, but still has to sweat a bit to do it, and is prone to explode the second someone doesn’t comply. It’s a complex, far deeper performance than it initially appears. His emergence into the film is so sudden and hilarious, Arnold not afraid to embrace some laughs at his expense, that his gradual opening-up becomes as much an act of discovery for Bailey as it does for the audience. We move together in seeing different sides of him.
Arnold’s camera, guided – as it has been since her 2003 short film Wasp – by Robbie Ryan, remains a reactive creature, waiting for the characters to move and then captivatingly contorting itself to keep pace with them. It brings life to Bailey’s life, readying it for the inspiration Bird lends it. One can only say too much and not enough about Rogowski’s work here. He is simply the most exciting, original actor of his generation, defiant of any common approach to his characters, and boldly physical. No, this role doesn’t require the sexual demands of Passages or Great Freedom; it only requires that his body seem to hover an inch above the ground, that it could lift anything without an ounce of strength. And in every scene, I believed it did.
Her stock story – a young girl with a rough home life finds inspiration from a wandering stranger – is Arnold’s once again to frustrate, challenge, indulge, and upend. She remains, despite this seeming repetition, an electric force in narrative cinema that jolts it awake too infrequently. With seven years between Fish Tank and American Honey, and eight between Honey and this (I could wrestle for a further 800 words on how Cow fits into this, but that’s far too much for now), she’s remained a slyly political voice, and an enduring humanist who has few easy answers for our own revelation. I savor every second of her work, and it ricochets through my head in my off hours, hovering just within sight, staring down at me.
