It’s clear the adults around Birdy envy her wildness, which is why they don’t control it. Ms Ramsey manages to thread the very tricky needle of making Birdy into a charmingly rowdy kid and not an arrogant little demon. Just think of the laundry resulting from that opening scene. But Birdy, still being a spoiled child, could care less about what other people need.

The family is in financial trouble, and a dowry for Birdy now she’s fertile would solve all their problems. Birdy shares a bed with lifelong nanny Morwenna ( Lesley Sharp), who discovers Birdy has begun menstruating – the fact Birdy knows nothing about her body or how babies are made is laughable, but we’ll let that go. Her father Lord Rollo ( Andrew Scott) is an unimpressive drunk her mother Lady Aislinn ( Billie Piper, underused) is permanently pregnant, though no child after Birdy has survived. The diary is now letters to her older brother Edward the Monk ( Archie Renaux) there’s another brother in the castle, Robert ( Dean-Charles Chapman), with whom she bickers constantly. In the movie, Birdy ( Bella Ramsey) is fourteen, but a very young fourteen the opening scene shows her amidst a mud fight with the peasants who work in her family’s castle. She keeps pet birds, as a metaphor, and is twelve years old. Written by Karen Cushman and published in 1994 (when Ms Dunham was eight), it’s the diary of a English lady in the late thirteenth century who has achieved marriageable age, and her feelings about her looming future as a sexual creature.

This highly complicated, highly sexualised back catalogue means that Ms Dunham’s choice to adapt the young adult novel “Catherine Called Birdy” is all of a piece. In her most recent movie, “Sharp Stick” (2022), a young woman uses a graphic sexual checklist in an attempt to force emotional maturity onto herself, which works only through the intervention of a sex worker. People don’t like to admit this, but this is a secretly accurate depiction of how many people live. In the seven seasons of her TV show, “Girls,” the main characters’ sexual exploits were much more important than any of their career ones. Writer-director Lena Dunham’s speciality is depicting how people learn about themselves through their sexual choices. Starring: Bella Ramsey, Billie Piper, Andrew Scott, Joe Alwyn, Lesley Sharp, Sophie Okonedo, Paul Kaye, Dean-Charles Chapman, Archie Renaux, Isis Hainsworth, David Bradley

Writers: Lena Dunham, Karen Cushman (based on the book by)

Catherine called birdy novel