Catherine Called Birdy review – Lena Dunham’s delightful medieval romp

Toronto film festival: The Girls creator handles an adaptation of Karen Cushman’s much-loved novel with wit and creativity

Catherine Called Birdy, Lena Dunham’s thoroughly enjoyable adaptation of the millennial YA classic by Karen Cushman, opens in the mud. Fourteen-year-old Catherine, played with gusto by Game of Thrones’s Bella Ramsey, rolls in the dirt with her village friends, relishing the filth that coats her clothes, her cherubic face, her curtain of dark hair. The year is 1290, in the English shire of Lincoln, and Catherine is about the enter the muck that is adolescence – an indignity and a romp that Dunham, who captured both in the unfairly dismissed HBO series Girls, turns into a delicious treat.

It’s a welcome return for Dunham, whose previous feature as a writer-director this year, Sharp Stick, her first since 2011’s Tiny Furniture, was a strange disappointment. Whereas Sharp Stick’s coming-of-age plot, a mid-twenties sexual awakening, was hobbled by a bizarrely infantilized protagonist, Dunham finds a sweet spot here through Cushman’s flinty, undaunted medieval heroine. Feudal England is not a great place to be a young girl, even if you’re the only daughter of the village lord, but Ramsey’s Catherine has a keen nose for fun – which, in this era, can also double as survival. She stuffs rags soiled with her menstrual blood beneath the outhouse floorboards, lest her father, the feckless spendthrift Lord Rollo (a delightful Andrew Scott) learn that she is marriageable, and thus a solution for his debts. When the suitors arrive, she devises new ways to repulse them: a feral costume, the release of her pet birds, a “salve” of foraged shit.

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