Catherine Called Birdy: Greg and Zanna review Lena Dunham's new coming-of-age film

Catherine Called Birdy.

Greg and Zanna watch a movie about marital avoidance.

SCORES

Appreciation for institution of marriage: 0
Grammatical accuracy: 0

SHE SAW

Greg called this movie boring. I guess unwanted periods and inappropriate betrothals are not something he's ever taken much interest in. I found it perfectly sweet and entirely unexpected from the woman who made her name with a series that revelled in sexual encounters of the awkward kind, and introduced viewers to things like buttcheek motorboating. Unlike Girls, Lena Dunham's Catherine Called Birdy is essentially a film for tweens, based on a novel that was also for that age set. I'd never heard of it and neither had any of my friends who would've been right in the target market when it came out in the 90s, but apparently it was quite formative to a generation of young girls somewhere.

The lead character of Birdy is played by Bella Ramsey, who many will know from Game of Thrones, in which she played Lady Lyanna Mormont, a fierce young girl who led her people in a brutal battle. Birdy isn't dissimilar. She's a plucky 14-year-old, living in medieval England, who isn't ready to grow up and leave behind her life of mud fights, playing chasey in the fields and inventing new curse words. When her father discovers she has started menstruating, despite Birdy's attempts to hide it, she must be immediately married off to a vile old man to help solve the family's financial difficulties. And so much of the film follows Birdy's desperate attempts to evade marriage.

While the quirks and conventions aren't entirely original - we've seen period pieces that use contemporary music before, like Sofia Coppola's Marie Antoinette, or any one of Baz Luhrman's musicals - they're done to good effect. Billie Piper and Adam Scott are perfectly cast as Birdy's parents and, despite wanting to despise Lord Rollo for selling off his young daughter to the highest bidder, Scott's effortless charm that had us all swooning in Fleabag prevents him being the evil villain he might otherwise be.

I wouldn't call the film laugh-out-loud funny but it's definitely a comedy and that light touch is what I think will make it fun and empowering viewing for young girls. While Greg was yawning through boredom, I was blubbering like a baby and pumping my fist in triumph. I'll try not to think too hard about our different reactions because it might make me recall Clementine Ford's talk at the Writers Festival in which she hammered home the fact that the institution of marriage continues to be uniformly bad for women and uniformly good for men - increasing our domestic load while decreasing it for men. I love my husband infinitely but no one can blame Birdy for wanting to run like the wind.

HE SAW

Because this movie was made by the genius Lena Dunham, I kept waiting for it to do something revolutionary or at least interesting, as did her landmark television show Girls, which changed the way young women were represented on screen.

I understand this movie was a passion project for Dunham, based as it is on the book of the same name, which she loved as a child. I also appreciate that artists should not be limited to working in a certain mode and that maybe she felt obliged to remain faithful to the source material. I just couldn't reconcile that the maker of Girls didn't want to do something more exciting with it than she did.

It's not a bad movie, and it's not without quirk. For instance, each new character was introduced with a freeze frame and some on-screen text in bullet point form, offering interesting biographical details, and this was sometimes funny. Other than that, the only serious innovation was the film's omission of a comma from the title. Where the book was Catherine, Called Birdy, the movie is Catherine Called Birdy.

This is a big mistake. The book's title suggests, accurately, that you're about to experience a story about someone named Catherine, who is more commonly known as Birdy. The movie's title suggests that you're about to watch a movie about someone named Catherine, who calls/yells/hollers for someone/something called Birdy. If you're waiting for that to happen, as I was, you'll be sorely disappointed.

I loathe grammar pedants as much as the next person who's ever been shamed for their incorrect application of a semicolon, but this is not pedantry. This is a big-budget Hollywood movie and nothing in big-budget Hollywood movies happens by accident. The dropping of the comma is a decision that we can assume was taken after many meetings, much inane discussion, endless email escalations/cascades, and possibly even audience testing. There's a good chance the comma-less title would even have been sent for final checking to a grammar pedant, whose presumed frenzied urgings to put it back were subsequently laughingly ignored by some besuited young Hollywood bigshot who put a picture of said pedant on a wall, wrote "nerd" on his face, then threw darts at it.

To the makers of Catherine Called Birdy and all others who think commas are a waste of time, let this be a lesson to you, they're not.

• Catherine Called Birdy is streaming on Prime Video now.