TIFF 2014 Review // Bird People

The description called it a “whimsical fable” that apparently blew audiences away at Cannes this year, so I was feeling pretty good about kicking off my TIFF experience with Bird People. I’ve never seen Ferran’s Lady Chatterly (2006), nor did I know anything about this film beyond a very vague description, so I was going in pretty blind. Bird People begins as a slow moving drama about a traveling businessman named Gary and a teenage chambermaid named Audrey. Gary arrives in Paris from San Francisco on business. After a quick meeting with clients he’s scheduled to zip off to Dubai. His one night in Paris is spent at the airport Hilton at which Audrey works. This is the uniting factor between our two stories.

The first half of the film is largely spent watching Gary argue with people on the phone. After making up his mind that he wants to leave his life behind him, we watch as Gary: speaks to his lawyer, speaks to his crying wife, and speaks to his distressed business partners. Ahh, whimsy. Meanwhile we watch as Audrey cleans hotel rooms and rides the bus. Poor Audrey.

If you didn’t know it was supposed to be a whimsical fable you’d be forgiven for thinking the film was a sort of kitchen sink drama. It moves ahead at a sluggish pace and even when things enter magic realism territory, it’s never really all that exciting. The two main characters have some interesting similarities, and Ferran is clearly interested in attempting to translate their state of mind to screen. The themes of loneliness and lack-of-self born of our fast-paced modern world are there in spades, and there are shades of Murakami in the premise, but it’s never particularly interesting. Overall it was underwhelming and rather boring for a film that was supposed to be “delightful and utterly suprising”, but I can see how someone with a bit more patience for characters could get into it.

Reviewed by Evan Arppe. 

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