Review: Catherine Called Birdy (2022) Sucked (Spoilers)

When I was in 5th grade, one of my required reading books was Catherine Called Birdy, a story about a girl growing up in medieval England and coming to terms with the transition from being a young girl with hardly a care in the world to a young woman with responsibilities, a transition that’s not made easier since her father is desperately trying to marry her off. When I read it, I really enjoyed the book. It was funny, the plot was good, and it absolutely captured the strangeness of growing into womanhood. With that said, when the movie adaptation came out in 2022 on Amazon, I wanted to see it, though no one else wanted to watch it because it was directed by Lena Dunham, a feminist nutball. Fast forward to last week however, I watched it for the first time with my mom and… oh boy, it was bad. Was it funny at times? Yes. But Lena Dunham made the movie creepy and really twisted what I had remembered the book being about.

I’m not going to number all the problems with this movie because they ultimately go back to one thing: toxic femineity from the feminist movement.

But what is toxic femineity? Aren’t men the only toxic ones in society while women are just oppressed goddesses held under the thumb of the ever-present patriarchy?

The answer to this is no. Just how men can be toxically masculine and use their greater strength to serve themselves to the detriment of others, women can be toxically feminine, using their femininity for the same goal. They call all men “toxic”, paint society as oppressive towards women (even though women have all the same (if not more) rights today than men do here in America), put down traditionally feminine women who aren’t trying to be a girlboss, and use ridiculous, often non-sensical guilt trips to justify and laud themselves when they do the same things that men would be called toxic for.

This type of thing is constantly seen in the movie version of Catherine Called Birdy and is a desecration of the book. For the first act of the movie, 14-year-old Catherine is shown roughhousing and playing like her male friends and she acts like a child and tries to utterly reject the fact that she’s growing into a woman and the responsibility that comes with it. This continues into the second act and while you can see her trying to be more like a woman, she still acts like a child even though she knows that if she does not fulfil her duty to marry a rich man, she will be dooming her family and the people under her father’s lordship. In the third act, it seems like she will reach the end of her character arc as she agrees to marry the suitor that she calls “Shaggy Beard” to pay for her brother to marry her best friend (which is not how dowries work, but okay), but this character arc is ruined when her father calls off the marriage (endangering himself, his family, and his serfs) and Catherine just returns to being the person she was at the start of the movie all in the name of female empowerment. We can be just as irresponsible, reckless, and childish as the men that we criticize for the exact same thing.

Now compare this to the book which has the exact opposite message in the end. In the book, Catherine does act like a child, however, she has a great character arc where she eventually comes to embrace her womanhood and is excited to be a wife and mother as she ends up marrying Shaggy Beard’s son. This is a story that tells tween girls that though things seem scary now, eventually, you will mature and love being a woman. This is a story that shows that though women aren’t as physically strong as men, we can still save the day and nurture peace through being traditionally feminine and this is a beautiful message for an adolescent girl to hear. However, in Lena Dunham’s version of this, the message is that femininity is stupid unless it means that you get to act impulsive and childish, which is a very harmful message to be selling to young women.

Because of the toxic femininity that pervades this movie, there was also a scene regarding Catherine’s first period that was not only historically inaccurate but was also incredibly creepy. In the movie, Catherine sits on the toilet and notices that she’s bled onto her underskirts. Confused by this, she takes it to her nurse and tells her that the blood came from her bum, a scene that in of itself would likely not have happened in real-life 13th-century England because they were an agrarian society where you saw how babies were made all the time. As though this wasn’t bad enough, Lena Dunham decided to take this scene one step further and have the nurse instruct Catherine to lay down on the bed and spread her legs so she can see where the blood came from to confirm that Catherine is on her period and explains where Catherine’s privates are in relation to other things (if you know what I mean). Not only was this disturbing given that this is supposed to be a 14-year-old girl getting her privates looked at by a much older woman for really no reason, but it’s also creepy because Bella Ramsey – the girl playing Catherine – was about 18 – 19-years-old, barely out of being legally considered a minor. But remember, it’s fine because this is female empowerment or something.

Other problems with this movie included Catherine’s aunt being flirty with her, degrading Uncle George’s character, making Catherine’s guy friend gay (which was not in the book), and the terrible costume design. I would not recommend this movie to anyone.

Until next time,

M.J.