“Where is she?” a desperate young woman says near the closing moments of Chloe Culpin’s remarkably humane film, The Pigeon. In one way or another, grief touches us all, and Culpin’s film allows us to feel the overwhelming confusions of these everyday moments–how we hope we can find answers when all seems lost. With tremendous fragility, we learn we will find our road back to healing–whether that road is literally beneath our feet or somewhere in the sky.
Culpin’s film opens with Charlotte Beaumont’s Frances on the ground of her apartment as she looks towards something we cannot see. Her breath is shallow and her eyes are wide before slowly making her way through her own space and finding the source of this stress: a cooing, bobbing, flapping pigeon. As someone who has been cautious of our feathered brethren for as long as I can remember, Frances’ reaction is very appropriate considering that, I think, every city dweller’s worst nightmare is an unwanted, flying visitor zooming through an open window and making themselves right at home.
After Frances tries to remove the pigeon from the apartment, she sits down and a thought percolates inside her mind. What if this bird is the new form of her recently deceased sister? Perhaps the stress of the moment allows Frances to believe this as the death certificate literally sits on the kitchen table staring back at her. Her approach to the pigeon softens, and we can almost read an apology coming through Beaumont’s eyes. If anyone decided to make a biopic of a young Rebecca De Mornay, she better be contacted first.
Frances enjoys rainy days with her sister; they watch movies together, and she even makes her a small, pigeon-approved paper crown that sits akimbo on her plumy noggin. These moments gather together the complexity and absurdity of grief. We don’t know how to act until we have to pick up the pieces and try to make it all make sense. We cannot fathom the waterfall of emotions we endure until we are about to tip over the edge, and Culpin expands on that unpredictability and need for comfort with a nimble touch.
The Pigeon has humor that reaches down into your gut and finds the pain that you don’t know how to untangle. Death unearths feelings that we didn’t know we had and allows us to grow even when we don’t want to. There is a rather magnificent shot of this pigeon flying through the sky. We feel comfort, we feel pain, and, in a very unpredictable way, Culpin’s film allows us to face this inevitability with grace and wit.
The Pigeon plays as part of Indy Short’s For the Birds program on July 25. It will play online as part of the festival’s online programming.
