Neil Young’s Film Lounge – Birthday Girl
BIRTHDAY GIRL
7/10
UK (UK/USA) 2002 : Jez Butterworth : 90 mins
Entertainingly unpredictable blend of comedy, romance, drama and thriller sees mousy bank-clerk John (Ben Chaplin) getting much more than he bargained for after ordering a mail-order bride via the internet. Russian beauty Nadia (Nicole Kidman) arrives speaking very little English, and is soon is joined by her boisterous pals Alexei (an alarmingly physical, kickboxing Vincent Cassel) and Yuri (Mathieu Kassovitz). Tensions mount in Johns quiet suburban cul-de-sac and Yuris violent temper gets out of hand. He takes Nadia hostage, forcing John to rob his own bank but this is only the start of his problems
Butterworths script (co-written with brother Tom) is a sharp, economical and unusually ambitious. Though essentially a miniature with only four real characters, Birthday Girl combines genres with engaging abandon, nimbly switching gear as the plots convolutions rapidly unfold. As well as an American Beauty -style attack on the deadening corporate culture epitomised by Johns bank, the film can be interpreted as his escapist daydream: Johns desire for danger and adventure is signalled by his mild masochistic tendencies, and its a telling detail that at one stage he’s beaten unconscious and left tied to a radiator.
All four actors have a lot of fun with the characters and their development: real-life best pals Kassovitz and Cassel audaciously dice with vodka-swilling stereotypes as the scheming Russians, while Chaplin and Kidman (though arguably too photogenic for their roles) convincingly chart the various stages in John and Nadias extremely stormy relationship. This makes the plots final twist especially satisfying, even if it does strain credibility more than a little. Birthday Girl has by this point built up a big enough store of engagingly idiosyncratic and amusing touches to keep audiences on-side: watch for Butterworth wittily and unobtrusively makes the view from Johns garden recall the Russian farm-vista in Tarkovskys Mirror. And when was the last time you saw a film in which characters actually walk all the way to an airport?
28th September, 2002
(seen 14th June, UCI Silverlink, North Shields)
by Neil Young
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