BIRDLAND – a film by Peter Lynch – SPOILERS ⁓

Police Detective Sheila Hood (Kathleen Munroe) suspects her ornithologist husband Tom Kale (David Alpay) is up to something. (She knows not what.) Sheila unofficially borrows police surveillance equipment, and watches him have an affair with Merle James (Melanie Scrofano), who is, in turn, the girlfriend of misogynistic gangster Ray Starling (Joris Jarsky). Merle, whose name comes from the latin word for “blackbird” is the rebellious, eco-activist daughter of cynical, self-serving oil magnate John James (Stephen McHattie). “People need oil. They demand oil,” says Mr. James. “Those who provide are the anointed, and those who don’t appreciate it can go fuck themselves.” Merle’s mother is never mentioned. Presumably she didn’t sufficiently appreciate it. The appellative similarity to John James Audubon could be coincidental.

Sheila, who moonlights as a P.I., convinces Merle’s father to hire her to figure out who’s sabotaging his fracking operation. She spots a crossbow on display in his office, and inquires.

Sheila: “You have a thing for the medieval era?”
John James: “Give me back the Knights of the Round Table and the search of the Sang-réal.”
Sheila: “Sounds so noble. What would we women do without you?”

It is unclear if James says san-gréal, meaning the Holy Grail, or sang réal, meaning royal blood. He arranges for Hazel to teach Sheila how to use a crossbow, and the etymology of the archery term “bulls eye” finds its way into conversation. (An arrow to the eye of a charging bull goes directly to the brain, without hitting bone.) Neither of the two murders in the film are done with a crossbow.

Sheila mimics Merle, dying her hair blonde; joining environmental protests; and wearing Merle’s blue kimono. The two women look quite alike to begin with, enough to make one wonder if they might be related.

Starling (named after the aggressively territorial bird) is well described by Merle’s sister Hazel (Cara Gee). “Watch out for Starling, though,” Hazel tells Sheila. “He’s a pretty dangerous guy. He’s not the kind of guy who’s particularly interested in your nice ass. He’s more interested in taking advantage of your wounds.” Hazel goes on to describe the differences between herself and Merle: “I admire her sense of purpose. How she became so different remains a mystery to me. She believes in something. Compared to Merle, I’m pretty crass and materialistic.” Witch-hazel does not derive its name from women with magical powers, but Hazel is bewitching and seduces nearly everyone she encounters. Watching her do that is the best thing about the movie.

All of this is presented as an interrogation of Sheila by a homicide detective named Calvin (Benjamin Ayres), and might be a dream in which Sheila questions her own actions and motivations. Whether or not that is the case, Sheila gets the last word. Alone at home with Tom as the story ends, she says (or thinks aloud): “We’re asleep throughout our lives, and it’s only in death that we wake up, just like we wake up from sleep every morning. This is a wake. For Merle, Starling, and anyone and anything who ever has died or ever will die. Death is not the end. Wakes are for the living.”

Laura Barrett‘s song “You Loved Me Forever” plays behind the credits. (The film’s soundtrack is by Barrett and José Contreras and are on TIDAL and SPOTIFY.)

“Eat Bugs and Dance” is track 11 on the soundtrack. Characters in the film discuss the prematurely reported demise of the ivory-billed woodpecker, a species that primarily dines on beetles. The food value of roasted beetle larvae, and the skeleton-cleaning talents of flesh-eating dermestid beetles are also mentioned.

Director Peter Lynch told Charles Trapunsky of Brief Take: “Cara Gee…confessed to me after, and now it totally makes sense, is that the way she had this aside to Tom and the whispering and the way she projected her sexuality and tragic sort of sense, that she was riffing on Marilyn Monroe. Birdland is not plot-driven per se, it’s more character-driven and it’s more about abstract ideas. It spins on the thematic elements of the pulls of sex and death. It’s more of a psychological portrait and that is what the actors helped me to create.”

In a separate interview, Scrofano addressed the physical similarity between herself and co-star Kathleen Munroe: “…a few years before I met Kathleen, my family in Vancouver had emailed me and complimented me on my work on a show I was not in. I looked it up and it was Kathleen…sometimes people didn’t even know which one was which on set. And when you watch the film, it helps her turn into Merle more believably.”

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BIRDLAND can be streamed on TUBI.