Bird People

Like her 2006 adaptation, Lady Chatterly, Pascale Ferran’s Bird People celebrates the expansiveness of the human spirit. Here it’s expressed in the need for non-carnal freedom, through the specific metaphor of flying. 

The opening montage in the Charles de Gaulle airport surveys a large number of people between flights, rushing helter skelter ground bound. They seem constrained, locked in patterns, in a word, caged even as they roam. A later montage shows the airport at night, still, vacated but for a strew of bodies asleep. Awake or sleeping the people bound to their daily regimens are cut off from the free range of their spirits and imagination. From that crowd two characters emerge to take flight. 

Gary Newman is the American in Paris, a Silicon Valley engineer there for a business meeting en route to a major project in Dubai. Gary is at a midway station (c’est la gare) in his life; an anxiety attack (angoisse) persuades him to become a New Man. He quits his job and abandons his wife and kids. By skipping his plane to Dubai and holing up at the airport Hilton he takes flight from all his responsibilities.  Actor Josh Charles has a bird-like mien, especially in our first view, with his beak, furrowed brow and pursed lips. He imagines a bird’s eye view of his rejected landing and reception at Dubai. 

In the hotel restaurant a piano is computer-rigged to play its keys without a pianist. The modern machinery continues without the original human engagement. Newman is confident his company and his family will carry on without him so he flies their respective coops. He breaks up with his wife through another magical technology. Skype allows a vivid, extended face-to-face discussion though an ocean apart. The dynamic reverses their usual discussions, where their physical closeness failed to bridge the growing abyss between them. Ferran encourages us to approve Newman’s clearly selfish declaration of potentially destructive independence. (To me his unforgivable irresponsibility was his tapping of the hotel mini-bar, not just the overpriced booze and chips but those little bottles of water! Damn, that hurt. True, when he sells his partners his company shares he will be able to support his ex-family and pay the Hilton tab, but still….)  

Hotel maid Audrey is oppressed by her job and its encroachment upon her university studies. Like Newman, she needs air; both open windows immediately upon entering a room. In the wake of a relationship she lives a solitary life. Her sense of people living encaged is suggested when she peers across the courtyard at the apartment dwellers living their separate lives in a row (shades of Rear Window). 

Though (or because?) she lacks Newman’s wealth, station and responsibilities Audrey discovers a magical power. She turns into a sparrow and flies all over the place. She learns how the polished hotel clerk Simon lives (sleeping in his car), gets a closer view of the other people in their cages and feels the exhilaration of soaring beyond her normal physical limits. The magic stays realistic: she also learns the bird’s urgent feeling of hunger and the existential threat from wind, cat, owl, traffic and locked stuffy room. 

Both as woman and as bird Audrey glimpses a touching alternative to the Newman marriage, an elderly woman waiting for her old husband to join her in a still juicy love. That injects a romantic possibility into the film’s last shot. Audrey and Newman finally meet and after parting return to introduce themselves and shake hands. They have discussed a verbal paradox: “personne” carries the contrary meanings of person and nobody. They consider the words that are contrary to “contrary.” They may find the ultimate romantic paradox: the greatest freedom can be found in a connection. Prefiguring that union, the Japanese artist saves bird Audrey from starving by giving her some chips and the woman by finding her unconscious and bringing her to a recuperating sleep in his room. His drawings of the bird prove her flight happened.    

     This delightful fable takes wing from yet another miraculous technology: the personification of sparrow Audrey. That also reminds us how we’re more richly endowed than ever with the potential of imaginative flight. In the flesh or in our fancy we can escape our lives of quiet desperation.