Bird People takes a mystical flight

    1 of 2 2 of 2

      Starring Josh Charles and Anaïs Demoustier. In English and French, with English subtitles. Rating unavailable.

      What do you get when you bump The Good Wife’s Will Gardner into a French free spirit ready for a life-changing experience? Bird People will answer that question, along with several others you didn’t even know you were asking.

      The two-hour tale is roughly bifurcated between its lead characters. Seen on the way to Paris is Gary Newman (Josh Charles), a Silicon Valley engineer who’s part of the plan to open a massive plant in Dubai. First day in town, he decides to quit everything—the project, his company, his line of work, and even his family—and just camp out at the airport Hilton while setting his hawkish features to figure out what comes next.

      The other main subject is freckle-faced young Audrey Camuzet (up-and-comer Anaïs Demoustier), whom we meet taking a train to work as a maid at that same hotel. She’s among passengers whose private thoughts are shared with us while we try to figure out who matters to the story.

      In a sense, story doesn’t matter much to writer-director Pascale Ferran, best known for her 2006 D. H. Lawrence adaptation, Lady Chatterley, likewise shot by inventive cinematographer Julien Hirsch. As in that effort, Ferran is concerned with the painful disjuncture between social constraints and the impulses of nature, although here the existentialism turns whimsical. She’s just as invested in side characters, such as the suave desk agent (Roschdy Zem) who’s secretly sleeping in his car, or any of the folks floating through the airport.

      Audrey is working full-time, although her parents think she’s still attending university. And when we follow her home, she spends the evening staring into other people’s windows, like a Gallic Rear Window. That’s about it for background. It was a mistake, then, to give so much weight to Gary’s situation. A long Skype argument with his predictably angry wife (Radha Mitchell) adds nothing to our understanding.

      Still, the banality of the first half makes the payoff even more gratifying, when the already birdlike Audrey goes through, shall we say, a sudden transformation that carries us through the hotel corridors and out into the airways above Charles de Gaulle and beyond. It’s a mystical flight that may leave some viewers cold, but this gently satisfying movie will strike sweet chords with many who’ve fantasized about getting out of themselves, quick.

      Comments