Gritty Realism, Opulent Intrigue, and Hollow Romance: ‘Bird’, ‘Conclave’, and ‘Anora’, Reviewed

December 2024 brings a trio of films from seasoned directors who have little in common, except that they are somewhat divisive. From the gritty realism of Andrea Arnold’s Bird to the opulent intrigue of Edward Berger’s papal-thriller Conclave, and the chaotic, darkly comic and deeply saddening world of Sean Baker’s Anora, these films showcase a range of modes of expressions and talents, which sometimes stick while others float away.

Please note, this article includes spoilers.

BIRD

Andrea Arnold’s latest feature takes place in North Kent, an estuary town not far from London, mostly in the squat where Bug (Barry Keoghan) lives with his 12-year-old daughter Bailey (Nykiya Adams), his wife-to-be Debs (Joanne Matthews) and Hunter (Jason Buda), his older son from a previous relationship. Bailey’s mother lives down and out with an abusive boyfriend and her three small children. 

A sense of freedom and oppression alternate throughout this piece of social realism, a mode which is familiar to Arnold (Fish Tank, American Honey): it opens with Bug and Bailey riding a scooter in town as Fontaines D.C.’s blare through Bug’s boombox, before we’re quickly introduced to the grit and squalor of squat life. Bailey sleeps on a mattress on the floor and Bug dispenses fatherly advice between a line of coke and a can of beer. There are two leitmotifs that are strong in Andrea Arnold’s feature, each helping unburden the film from its heavier kitchen-sink realism: music and animals. Bug is covered in tattoos of insects, while his new business venture involves a toad he has shipped from Colorado, whose secretions can produce a rare and expensive hallucinogenic from which he’s planning to make bank. Alas, the toad only responds to cheesy music, and they haven’t yet found the right tune. Bailey’s solace from a reality where there is no school, friends her own age or actual parenting, is to take videos of birds with her iPhone, small moments of happiness which foreshadow the arrival of Bird (Franz Rogowski). Bird is perceived to be a strange man – well, he’s very bird-like, to begin with – he has an accent that’s hard to place, wears a skirt, and claims to once have lived in Bailey’s tower block, and is there to find his parents. 

Franz Rogowski is considered one of the most peculiar and striking actors of our time, and though I think he’s talented, I thought he was miscast in this role. His performance and figure grow more enigmatic and slippery as the film progresses: Bailey watches him every night as he perches, completely naked, on the balustrade of the roof of the neighbouring tower block – he’s “free” like the birds of Bailey’s dreams, but his character has a sadness and loneliness that’s hard to shake off, and this seems to anchor him, rather than make him soar. It’s clear what Arnold is doing here – she’s departing from the grimy social realism, which the eyes of a 12 year-old kid are unable to process in its full misery, and adding a touch of magical realism, but it doesn’t quite work.  

Overall, this is a film that shows some promise – a sensible segue from Fishtank and American Honey – with great performances from Keoghan, who demonstrates range, and Adams, who takes on most of the film’s heft, delivering a stunning debut. But the move, in the film’s third act, from social realism to full on fantasy, feels disappointing. 

The scene where Skate (James Nelson-Joyce) is bashing Bailey’s mother’s head against the bathroom tiles after she’s tried to break up with him (while the daughter is at home with her) is the most violent and hard-to-watch in the movie, and Rogowski’s transformation into an actual, enormous bird (impossible not to conjure Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Birdman here), which fights Skate and eventually takes him far far away from them is a welcome relief, but the change of register is too random to stir an emotional reaction. At this point in the movie, it appears Arnold found an easy way out of unpacking the relationship between Bird and Bailey (and all the other complex family dynamics in-between), and ultimately deprives each character from completing a satisfactory arc. 

I had found Arnold’s social realism, infused with small moments of lyricism and grace and lightness – like when Bailey is peeing in a field among the horses and the wind all of a sudden picks up – a good register in which to tell this story, no matter how uncomfortable. Magical realism in stories of social realism has been done before, and with more successful results – for instance, in Alice Rohrwacher’s Lazzaro Felice / Happy as Lazzaro, which also uses animals – so there are solid predecessors, but Bird fails to rise above them.

After all, music here is the thing that provides a good escape from the grime; sometimes it’s an anchor for moments of happiness. I like a director who uses a particular soundtrack as a vehicle for storytelling, and I found Arnold’s poignant nods to British pop culture irresistible: if Fish Tank was Ja Rule and Ashanti, and American Honey was Rihanna, in Bird we have Fontaines D.C., Burial, Blur, and, yes, even Coldplay (which, as an anonymous commenter on the Internet said, might be “the best thing that happened to them since Brian Eno”). Indeed, the scene where the whole gang of misfits from the squat, high and drunk, sing along to Coldplay’s Yellow to encourage the mystic secretions of the toad is nothing if not memorable.

The transition from Bug blaring Too Real at the beginning to playing, according to Bailey, “dad’s music” at the end (The Verve’s Lucky Man) after performing one of the most caring fatherly duties in the film, doesn’t go unnoticed. And what about the cheeky Saltburn gag and little dig at Emerald Fennel? Yes, she did play Murder on the Dancefloor… how could she not?

CONCLAVE

As an Italian who has seen a couple of Popes being elected, who has travelled to Rome as a child for the Jubilee, and has experienced the influence of Catholicism strongly in her youth, I was curious about this film. The idea of a film that pries open the doors of the Vatican to reveal what goes on during the papal election is quite thrilling – so I wasn’t surprised this film was dubbed a “papal thriller”. As the name itself reveals, a conclave (cum: with; clave: key) is a room that can be locked, and in ecclesiastic jargon it represents the moment in which a College of Cardinals lock themselves inside the Sistine Chapel until a new Pope has been chosen. 

At the beginning of the film, we see builders coming to St Peter’s to seal the church shut, separating the curia from secular life. Not only are outsiders forbidden entry, even the news is not allowed into the conclave – as they could swing voters one way or another, and all the cardinals must remain focused. 

The performances of Isabella Rossellini (sister Agnes) and Ralph Fiennes (Cardinal Lawrence), above everyone else, are sublime – even though Roselllini doesn’t get as much screen time as I would have liked, her moments in the spotlight are precious. Fiennes, a man who was chosen not to shepherd but to manage, is simply astounding. Stanley Tucci’s performance in the role of Cardinal Bellini never truly takes off, just as his candidacy as future Pope. Sergio Castellitto in the role of Cardinal Toscano is, alas, a little gimmicky: a reactionary Roman Catholic determined to be the harbinger of tradition, one puff off his red vape at a time. 

In its best moments, Conclave reminded me of Paolo Sorrentino’s Il Divo, a film which similarly tries to capture the aura of someone larger-than-life – in that case it was the figure of politician Giulio Andreotti. In Berger’s film, characters are more human than holy, they are fallible men, conjuring degenerate plots to win the race to papacy. Some of them are racist and sexist, some are accused of simony – they accept money in exchange for votes. But they aspire to ascend, to be more than mere mortals, to have powers that grant them immortality. The sequence of events, after all, are similar to a political election: Men of god and politicians have in common that they are both men of power, and in Berger’s and Sorrentino’s depiction of power as something very mean but also very intangible and seductive, these two movies are related.

Stéphane Fontaine’s cinematography is worth a mention – the bright reds and stark whites, the symmetry in the sets, the long takes and the coldness of all those shiny marble surfaces. It’s an aesthetic that establishes a clear separation between the viewer and the story, which highlights the subject matter as something far and untouchable. 

The overheard shots amplify this feeling. Starting from the close-ups of Cardinal Lawrence’s face, in which the camera is always slightly angled downwards, lingering on the creases of his forehead like he’s being watched by something superior; there are the many birds-eye shots, which want to capture the collectiveness of the Congress. One of my favourite scenes features the cardinals in ensemble, with their red robes and white umbrellas, walking in the courtyard appearing like little mushrooms moving jointly beneath the rain – small, wannabe mighty, with purpose. And then there are the scenes at the conclave, the long thin needle piercing through the name of each candidate, the burning of the papers – black smoke, no Pope. The pleasure in watching this film above all is its observance of rituals, the devil (or its antithesis) is in the detail. There is one scene which again felt very close to Sorrentino’s sensibility: the moment in which Cardinal Lawrence places his own name inside the bowl, and a bomb goes off in the square breaking one of the top windows of the conclave, allowing the outside break in. It’s an instant which defies rationality, profoundly mysterious and inexplicable – yes, there are riots going on in Rome, but why that exact moment? The key takeaway from this film is that the most sacred thing we can do is to doubt, again and again. 

Which is why the last frame of the film is a little stroke of genius: once the conclave is over and the Pope is elected, Cardinal Lawrence opens the window and breathes in the air, and down below he sees three nuns leaving from one of the doors and giggling among themselves. A rare sliver of warmth and spontaneity we hadn’t yet seen in the film is gifted as a last memento, a humble suggestion that being open to “otherness” is a good thing. 

ANORA

If the first third of the film is a dazzling and electrifying (and sometimes slapstick funny) introduction to Anora/Ani (Mikey Madison), a sex worker in New York, the plot quickly devolves into a tired, depressing rehash of Pretty Woman injected with the Benny Safdie-esque energy of Uncut Gems. The final third, alas, is simply woeful and downright boring.

Madison is the true ruby in the rubble here, she is bedazzling and humane, funny and fierce, but a film such as this (135 mins which feels like 200, 35mm) can’t rest on the shoulders of one actor alone.

The film begins with Ani meeting Vanya/Ivan (Mark Eidelstein), the son of a Russian tycoon who’s on holiday in New York. He pays her for sex and and company, then slowly the relationship morphs into something more serious, and the two end up getting married during an impromptu trip to Vegas with Ivan’s friends. Allegedly, this is Ani’s ticket out of her life as a sex worker: she moves into his mansion and huddles up next to him on the gigantic sofa as he plays video games and passes her the bong. Things are bliss (I guess?) until two heavies sent by Ivan’s parents come to break the peace, news having reached them that Ivan got married to a “hooker”. 

Here Baker switches tone, from the glitz and the glam of the sex and the stripping to a sort of screwball dramedy with a lot of shouting, smashing, car-racing, and voices on top of voices which lack the anxious, high-stakes propulsion of Uncut Gems, and feel more like a meandering, pointless cover-up for the emptiness and boredom the film secretly harbours. When the going gets tough Ivan runs away and Ani is left to pick up the pieces and fight off the henchmen, who tie her up and gag her as she screams “RAPE” while in her underpants. Collectively they then try to track down Ivan – smashing candy stores in Coney Island, breaking into restaurant kitchens, shivering in the cold and throwing up in the car (a moment of slapstick from actor Vache Tovmasyan that steals a laugh from the audience) – finally finding him at HQ, Ani’s strip club. Of course, the boy turns out to be as spineless as we all had imagined: not only has he run away, but he is wasted and gets caught in one of the private rooms as he’s about to hook up with Ani’s sworn enemy from the club. When the parents arrive – a gimmicky duo which Baker should have known better to keep off screen to maintain a shred of mystery – Ivan doesn’t stand up for Ani and obediently submits himself to annulling the marriage. All of it is hardly surprising. 

And yet Ani is shaken, flabbergasted, but my question here is why is she? She still believes she can persuade him to conform and stay married to her, sure, but, again, why? Ani’s unwavering belief in Ivan’s potential for redemption is perplexing. Baker’s character study is frustrating – both dated and straight up naive. Surely, someone with Ani’s nous and vim would be more discerning, less likely to be swept off their feet by a chronically immature and spoiled brat.

Is she a baddie because she is feisty and she swears? But where is her agency? How has she completely believed the lie pedalled by this prepubescent-looking boy? And how is this what she wants? Her complete buy-in to Ivan’s lies are both unbelievable and insulting. I shouldn’t have to remind you that sex workers aren’t stupid and aren’t out there looking for a wealthy client to rescue them. In over two hours of film, I could not find Ani: her motivations, desires, and aspirations remain obscured.

Characterising this film as a “modern fairytale” is heartless, because there’s nothing aspirational nor uplifting here. The henchmen aren’t funny, Ivan quickly becomes irritating, the scene in the house which is supposed to set-off the whole chase is uncomfortable to watch, not to mention the bleak coda. And whoever called this movie “realism” fails to see the world emerging from Baker’s camera, one which is neither well researched nor sufficiently informed enough to considered realistic. The last scene, where Ani ends up hooking up / cuddling in the car with one of the henchmen (the one who’d previously gagged and restrained her) is one of the saddest finales I have seen. Is this really all we have to hope for? Is this cynicism and inability to conjure alternatives now a filmmaker’s only edge?

Maddalena Vatti is a literary scout and freelance writer based in London. Her writing has appeared on Review 31, Lit Hub, Il Tascabile and other magazines. Header image: Still from Conclave, courtesy of Black Bear UK.