Notice: This article contains spoilers about Catherine Called Birdy.
Director Lena Dunham described Karen Cushman’s “Catherine Called Birdy”She considers it a work that is deeply ingrained in her being, with a world that is easy to create and populate. However, she wanted to make the story more optimistic.
Dunham’s film follows Cushman’s story pretty closely, which focuses on young Lady Catherine, who goes by Birdy (Bella Ramsey), daughter of Lord Rollo (Andrew Scott) and Lady Aislinn (Billie Piper). Birdy’s impending arranged marriage to some random stranger drives the film’s plot, as she does everything humanly possible to turn off her suitors.
“The last act shifts pretty significantly from the book, and that just had to do with a real desire to be able to leave Birdy’s character in a better place than we found her,”Dunham spoke to. “The book has a beautiful ending, but an ending that’s slightly somber and quite realistic. Our ending has realism to it also. That came out of the dynamic between Birdy and her father that we built a bit differently than the one in the book.”
In Cushman’s book, Birdy ultimately escapes her last suitor who she calls Shaggy Beard, because he dies, but his son marries her in place of the older, gross man. Birdy feels that she will be able to get along with her son and is happy at the conclusion of the book. The film ends with Birdy’s escape from Shaggy Beard as well, but not because he dies. Lord Rollo, her father, was originally ‘sells’She meets Shaggy Beard and follows him to his carriage.
Birdy meticulously records all of these events in her life. This was her request by Edward Renaux (Archie Renaux), her monk brother. He wanted her to do so in order for her to mature and be more knowledgeable.
“In terms of how she matured, something that is in the book that we tried to bring out more [was] this idea of her starting to understand that other people [around her] are in pain,”Dunham spoke. “Birdy starting to realize that everybody around her is also trapped in their own sort of proverbial cage and experiencing their own challenges with the society that they live in was a really beautiful thing to watch Bella play.”
Several scenes in the film point towards Birdy’s growing awareness, like when she makes a very big sacrifice by giving Shaggy Beard’s silver to her brother Robert so that Robert can marry Birdy’s best friend Aelis (Isis Hainsworth). To spend Shaggy Beard’s money means that Birdy commits to marrying him, even though she does not want to.
“She definitely learns that she has to be her own hero. She realizes that she maybe can’t control the things that she would like to control,”Ramsey was also mentioned. “There are other things in her situation that she can control so to focus on them and to just be free in ways that she can be free.”
Birdy is able to control the fate of her pets birds at the end of the movie. She lets them go in her new freedom, and the film ends in a much more optimistic way than the book.
“That is like symbolic in a way of her just letting go of— it’s like letting the birds be free which is all that she wants to be and realizes that she she can be within the constraints of her time and the constraints around her — she can create her own freedom,”Ramsey spoke about that particular scene.
Dunham shared some bonus information about Ramsey’s relationship with the birds they used on set.
“[Birdy’s] not the only person trapped in her own sort of cage in a way. She’s been granted this moment of freedom and suddenly she doesn’t want to see anything else around her caged,”Dunham spoke. “I love that moment because just some trivia for you: The bird wrangler was really worried about how [his pigeons] would respond to Bella and she was pigeon whisperer. I feel like they knew that Bella was like an animal loving vegan because they just relaxed in her hands. One of them literally started rubbing his head on her face.”
“Catherine Called Birdy”It is streaming now on Amazon Prime Video October 7