Taglines: Before they share a future, khey have to survive her past.
Internet love connections and mail-order brides rarely ever work out, and John should have known. Having never been lucky in the game of love and tired of waiting for the perfect woman to come along, John decides to take his chances and orders a mail-order bride from Russia online. At first, things seem perfect: his new bride Nadia is a gorgeous woman, and although she may not speak much English, her skills in the bedroom more than make up for any communication problems. When Nadia’s ‘cousins’ unexpectedly arrive to celebrate her birthday, John is drawn into their web of corruption and crime.
Birthday Girl is a 2001 British comedy thriller film directed by Jez Butterworth. The plot focuses on English bank clerk John Buckingham, who orders a Russian mail-order bride, Nadia. It becomes clear upon her arrival that Nadia cannot speak English, and early into her stay, two mysterious men come to the house claiming to be her cousin and cousin’s friend. The film features Nicole Kidman, Ben Chaplin, Mathieu Kassovitz, and Vincent Cassel. English and Russian are spoken interchangeably in the film.
Film Review for Birthday Girl
Nicole Kidman’s dalliance with accents — she sometimes seems to be a tomboy version of Meryl Streep — works in her favor in ”Birthday Girl,” a collision course of plot twists. Ben Chaplin, saddled with a nerd’s close-cropped coif to signal his inability to relate to others (as well as expose his ears, which makes him look even nerdier), plays John, a neat-freak bank clerk in England. John has such a passion for organization that he even categorizes his collection of fetishistic pornography. He has just subscribed to an online Russian mail-order bride service, and he gets Nadia (Ms. Kidman).
As soon as we see his chocolate-brown urchin eyes happily peering at his new wife, we know it’s only a matter of time before he’s bound and gagged in his underwear. Mr. Chaplin is carrying on at the same level of romantic discomfort he experienced in ”The Truth About Cats and Dogs,” in which he was equally ill at ease over another tall, willowy woman, Uma Thurman.
That picture was about impostures being revealed, too, but there’ s quite a bit more at stake here; eventually, the circumstances threaten both John’s career and life. The director and co-writer, Jez Butterworth, seems to have been inspired by the playful malice of the team that brought us the British thriller ”Shallow Grave.” This breathless demi-noir has so much bounce that we barely get any time to mull over the gaping holes in its moth-eaten plot. It is competent but extremely slight.
Ms. Kidman is allowed to use her strapping figure and express some open physical pleasure in being a big girl. Her Nadia is too much for the repressed, slightly nervous John to handle; it’s as if he tossed some seeds out of the window one night and awakened the next morning to this feminine beanstalk. A couple of unwanted sprouts also come along with Nadia, like Yuri (Mathieu Kassovitz), her cousin-who’s-not-quite-a-cousin; and his traveling companion, the gangly, rambunctious Aleksei (Vincent Cassel). After their arrival, ”Birthday Girl” veers off its obvious road — John’s struggling with Nadia’s inability to speak English but finally softening toward her — into some rather scary detours.
The off-road bounces the film takes are diverting but not really unexpected; they are necessary, if only because the picture is so slight. And the film is brisk and tidy, which keeps it from enjoying its own sleaziness, like John’s combination of joy and embarrassment over Nadia’s embracing his deviant behavior behind closed doors.
”Birthday Girl” takes its lead from Ms. Kidman and her high-hurdle sprinter’s figure. The film quickly vaults over one obstacle after another. And Ms. Kidman seems liberated from having to blow high-toned vowels through her nostrils. Nadia has the dark hair and pale Eurotrash good looks of the hangers-on who scour The New York Post looking for their faces in the background of the celebrity party shots.
She’s too athletic to play demure, and she’s happy to fold her limbs around a leading man who doesn’t get a neck cramp from having to stare up at the bottom of her chin. And Mr. Chaplin plays John like an ingénue. John’s furtive delight as he discovers exactly what he’s capable of — how close to the precipice he can go, and also how he can rise to an occasion — over the course of the picture provides a little energy, too.
Like the con jobs that Nadia’s friends perpetrate to string John and the rest of us along, ”Birthday Girl” feels like nothing more than a pleasant but distant business transaction. At the heart of any great film noir — or, for that matter, any decent one — is the moment when the hero discovers that everything he believed in was wrong, the beat when heartbreak sweeps in.
Mr. Chaplin gets to register a shattered take; he was probably cast because his basset-hound eyes easily brim with hurt. The other fleeting moments of enjoyment come from Mr. Kassovitz’s Aleksei, whose glee over the perks of the capitalist system are as much fun to watch as Mischa Auer was in ”My Man Godfrey” as a Russian poet manqué with a taste for the good life; he deserves more screen time.
But finally, the plot is too insubstanstantial, despite the efforts of Mr. Butterworth and his brothers, Tom Butterworth, a co-writer, and Steve Butterworth, a co-producer. By the end, all ”Birthday Girl” does is toss off a few sparks. It doesn’t generate enough down-and-dirty firepower to burst into flames.
Birthday Girl (2002)
Directed by: Jez Butterworth
Starring: Nicole Kidman, Ben Chaplin, Vincent Cassel, Mathieu Kassovitz, Kate Lynn Evans, Stephen Mangan, Rebecca Clarke, Katya Barton-Chapple, Sally Phillips
Screenplay by: Tom Butterworth, Jez Butterworth
Costume Design by: Phoebe De Gaye
Set Decoration by: Verity Roberts, Linda Wilson
Art Direction by: Diann Wajon
Art Direction by: Rebecca Holmes, Diann Wajon
Makeup Department: Noriko Watanabe
Music by: Stephen Warbeck
MPAA Rating: Taglines: Before They Share A Future, They Have To Survive Her Past.
Distributed by: Miramax Films
Release Date: February 1, 2002
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