She’s often stuck in the care of her loving but stern handmaiden, Morwenna (Lesley Sharp), and barred from all the fun stuff in life like going to public hangings with her lower-class friends Perkin and Meg (Michael Woolfitt and Rita Bernard-Shaw, respectively). ![]() She wants - needs, rather - to be herself without any boundaries or barriers. The problem, of course, is that Birdy doesn’t want to be a wife, or anything everyone else wants her to be. Scott, known best to Tumblr-era millennials at Moriarty from the BBC’s Sherlock and to Amazon Prime subscribers as the “Hot Priest” from Fleabag, gives a performance so devastating it’ll be made into Twitter clips that circulate every six weeks for years to come. The source of her woes is that her period has come at last, signaling to her brutish, drunken father (Andrew Scott) that she’s ready to wed and thus acquire a dowry that can save the family’s finances. Birdy is hawkish and petulant - charming, but you have to be able to tolerate her first - and the film is refreshingly willing to make her look bad, which it often does. If you didn’t make it far enough in the doomed HBO show, Ramsey’s turn in Birdy will be a pleasant surprise: She is an exciting, capable newcomer whose performance is devoid of technical theatrics or youthful preening. Though Dunham takes a fair amount of liberties with her adaptation of Cushman’s novel, the film is her best work to date, rich with her signature sense of humor and with a nuanced balance between the loving and brutal parts of life.ĭunham’s Catherine Called Birdy is much more plotted than the novel, which centers on the drama surrounding the impending marriage of its titular character, played by Bella Ramsey, a scene stealer from Game of Thrones’ later seasons. What’s more, she’s the perfect muse for writer/director Lena Dunham, whose film adaptation of the novel (with the same title, minus a comma) opens to limited theaters on Friday and Amazon Prime on Oct. She is, to put it mildly, a huge brat.īeyond her distinctive attitude, however, Birdy is a dream protagonist: complex, strange, funny, and altogether winning. She’d rather run around outside, playing with goats or her friend Perkin, or do anything that hasn’t been asked of her. Birdy has no desire to wed, no desire to read, no desire to sit and sew or do spinning. The book is a first-person account written from the perspective of a precocious young girl in medieval England who defies all that defines her. ![]() “The stars and my family align to make my life black and miserable,” writes Catherine, often called Little Bird or Birdy, in the opening pages of Karen Cushman’s Newbery Medal-winning novel Catherine, Called Birdy.
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