Bird People

Pattern 38 gives a thumbs-up to the idea of integrating disparate story ideas into a single narrative. Of course, most narratives do this to some extent. Take yesterday’s movie, Interstellar: you could write a whole movie about a world succumbing to a new Dust Bowl, and you could write a whole movie about explorers looking for colony worlds, and you could write a whole movie about the abandonment issues of an astronaut’s daughter, but Interstellar wove them all together. What Bird People does, by contrast, is take two very different hour-long movies (they’re not even in the same language!) and stitch them together, claiming that a shared setting (the CDG Hilton) and a broad thematic link justify calling this a single two-hour movie. It doesn’t really. But the two movies are pretty interesting individually, and I can actually imagine teaching this movie in my World Lit class as an exercise in “can you in fact spot the thematic link”. Click the sled if you want some spoilers:

So (after an introductory sequence suggesting that everyone has a story and which one you follow is arbitrary) the first hour is about a globe-trotting Silicon Valley guy who abruptly decides to give it all up: to quit his job, leave his family, and stay in Europe. I guess selling off his stocks gives him the wherewithal to take a permanent vacation. The second hour is about a housekeeper at the hotel where the Silicon Valley guy is staying. Cleaning hotel rooms all day is kind of a slog, and one evening she unexpectedly turns into a sparrow. Life as a sparrow is liberating in a way⁠—you can fly anywhere you want! cheep cheep!⁠—but also dangerous, as you have to dodge cats and owls and constantly need to be on the lookout for food. That both stories are about the yearning for freedom from responsibility seems clear enough that I think a bunch of tenth-graders would pick up on it pretty easily, don’t you?