The Bird (L'Oiseau) and The Bird

Yesterday felt a little melancholy.

Sad news arrived about Mrs Jones, who is deteriorating in hospital. I met with her daughter-in-law and had one of those sad conversations I have had a million times before at work.

It is now the time to support relatives. 

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Last night I went to see the French film L'Oiseau.

It was not an easy watch.

Anna (Sandrine Kimberlain) lives a quiet, pointless and isolated  life in a grubby Bordeaux apartment. She works as a faceless kitchen porter, has frosty relationships with her co-workers and spends most of her spare time alone in a emotionally bankrupt world where she says and feels very little.

Over a lengthy and moody introduction to her somewhat sad life, we gradually find out that Anna has lost a young son, a bereavement that destroyed her marriage,and it is this faceless, unsympathetic grief that director Yves Caumon presents, in all of it's uncompromising and difficult facets.

Anna, is not the gamine little Amelie, existing  in a cute, isolated little world. As portrayed by the tall, shopworn Kimberlain, she is a bookish,difficult, prickly shell of a woman, who is not adverse in picking up drunken strangers at obscure Japanese movies and walking the dark streets of the city at night.

She is not a woman anyone could warm to.

Her salvation comes in the shape of a small pigeon who becomes trapped behind her fireplace. She frees the animal who becomes an uneasy flatmate, and in their brief time together, the bird becomes the emotional catalyst Anna needs to start to move forward.

There is no sentimentality in Anna's psychological journey, indeed Caumon peppers the whole film with a challenging ambiguity. The "bird "is not merely a indication of hope and an object of affection, it could  also be  a mirror image of Anna, an animal trapped by it's own fears and inabilities. Whatever the answer is, Anna's transformation is documented with tremendous care and with meticulous patience,

and although the film is certainly not a "Lassie Come Home" movie, the tiny moment when the pigeon makes "contact" with Anna's buried emotions is incredibly touching to watch.

8/10

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To bookend this "review" somewhat, I will leave you with some news of the three Marrans who were "donated" to me a few weeks ago.. The chap that brought them , warned me that all were big rangers, so I guess I was not too surprised that one evening only one bird arrived back to her nesting coop.The other two, I suspect crossed the riding stables' fields and have either got lost or got picked off by a predator before they could roost.

Whatever happened, the one lone Marran is proving to be somewhat of a compelling character . Everyday she gallops away from the existing hens to live a solitary, bullied life on the peripheries of the field.

It seems a somewhat sad state of affairs.

I know it sounds somewhat indulgent, but a couple of times a day, I will seek the hen out and will  surreptitiously drop some corn nearby so she can feed without interruption and without bullying from the other hens and the ewes .

And what have I called this sad lonely little character?

Anna of course