Catherine Called Birdy, 2022

This is a fun, funny, and charming little film narrated by Catherine, a 14-year-old girl in 1200s England. It's fresh but not purposefully anachronistic (but neither is it over-stuffed with distracting narrative artifacts and overly oncerned with preserving every facet of the High Middle Ages ). Telling the story of pubescene and womanhood in the 1200s means showing a medieval toilet or a demonstration of a medieval period pad-and, much like House of the Dragon, it places the appropriate weight on the horrors and importance of childbirth or the injustices of the patriarchal marriage practices of the time. And yet, it doesn't feel as oppressively heavy as a walk through horrific medical artifacts in a history museum. Because it's about people, our universal grapplings with identities and adulthood and love and friendship. We aren't there to gawk. 

The indignities, injustices, and raw pain of burgeoning womanhood are balanced nicely with humor, delight, and joy--a balance she's is always really good at, imo. (Amy Nicholson agrees: "[...] Dunham prevails in convincing audiences that coming-of-age in a so-called simpler time was equally tumultuous, and crams the corners of her movie with images of other female characters discreetly seizing their own moments of satisfaction — glimpses of joys which realize that it’s in the margins of a medieval tale where the best stuff happens.") 

Catherine Called Birdy was a lovely way to spend an early morning stuck under a sleeping baby, and I really like it (and seeing Andrew Scott draped in silks is nice, too). 10/10, good shit.