If you believe in the overwhelming importance of people’s faces in cinema, (actor)‘s face is a hell of a face to put at the centre of your film: vulnerable and assertive, visibly hiding behind itself, necessarily reserved about its own feelings, reflecting what’s going on around it.
Similarly, although I can easily imagine having one’s fill of Rogosz, I’m nowhere close yet. Whatever the equivalent of a psychopomp for adolescence is, where so much of life has already had to be learned already. His training as a dancer and possibly even clown school feel like they’re at the fore here, with that mesmeric affectless cleft lip lisp.
Keoghn I was less keen on - you felt the performance more. But his character was perfectly ambiguous, a sort of Puck - a dangerous uncontrollable love, unpleasant, bullying, loving, beautiful at times.
I would agree the film is a hot mess in some ways – pretty chaotic in terms of how it goes about itself - but I don’t mind that particularly.
More generally, this is a mode in which I’m interested. I think the grotesque - here one early formal definition of the grotesque which involves the distorting combination of the vegetative and animal - is a significant mode for our times. It dramatises that permeable zoonotic barrier aesthetically. The malign pastoral bumps up against the human and this is a community generally which closely adjacent to the communities that exist more fluidly between the two lands - gypsy, romany, traveller - depending their self-identification (i’m being cautious but the word that would naturally come to me would be a well known term that became used derogatorily, slang for a boy - with a long ‘a’) – as we saw with the boys with their horses.
Bird’s mother is just believed to have wandered off into the marshes - which is proper magical foundling territory.
Medway Kent is perfectly balanced here between the natural and urban, and just like any Edwardian children’s tale, the ability to travel between the two (one magical, one not) is closely linked to the status of your childhood and adolescent sexuality.
Even a later, looser definition of the grotesque, which encompasses a melange of comedy and tragedy, often inappropriately yoked, isn’t entirely inappropriate here.