Birthday Girl Review
by Jon Popick (jpopick AT sick-boy DOT com)January 4th, 2002
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Nicole Kidman's career has been full of hits and misses - something that became painfully clear in 2001 when the actress starred in both the truly awful (Moulin Rouge) and the elegantly sublime (The Others). Her latest - the middling Birthday Girl - lands somewhere between the two, tilting ever so slightly toward the positive.
Though she's the biggest name in Girl, Kidman isn't really the star. Those honors go to Lost Souls' Ben Chaplin, who plays John Buckingham, a single Londoner with a boring bank job and no social life of which to speak. As ordinary and unassuming as you can get, John does something astonishing for such a vanilla character: He orders a Russian mail-order bride via the internet. When he heads to the airport to fetch his wife-to-be, he's shocked to find Nadia (Kidman), but not as much for her vampy-slut good looks as her inability to speak English and penchant for cigarettes.
A stickler for efficiency and perfection, John takes Nadia home and spends most of his waking moments during the next few days unsuccessfully trying to call the mail-order company to swap his betrothed for the English-speaking, non-smoking model he ordered. No such luck. Instead, John is forced to communicate with Nadia in ways we've probably all seen in movies and television a bunch of times before.
Somebody famous - I think it was Arnold Palmer - once said love is the international language, and that's just what John discovers when Nadia unearths his stash of porn videos while he's off at work. With new, non-verbal ways to please her man swimming around her Russian brain, Nadia surprises John when he gets home, which is right around the time he stops caring about the language barrier and the smoking.
The two grow closer and closer, but the relationship hits a bit of a snag on Nadia's birthday when two of her Russian cousins (Amélie's Mathieu Kassovitz and The Messenger's Vincent Cassel) show up and turn John's life upside-down. There are surprises and more surprises, but nothing a sleuth of Encyclopedia Brown caliber couldn't figure out without too much problem. The script, co-written by director Jez Butterworth and brother Tom, doesn't strive to be anything more than fun escapism, and that's just what it is.
There are enough quirks in Girl to make it interesting - some sound and others silly. For starters, we're watching an Aussie and two French guys playing Russians, but they're actually speaking Russian instead of merely sporting an accent that comes across as a fusion of Count von Count and Boris Badenov (though, for some reason, they still sound like that). It's also fun to watch Kassovitz and Cassel act together, considering the former occasionally directs the latter (including last year's The Crimson Rivers and the César-winning Hate). Leading the charge behind the camera are potential future Oscar nominees for Best Score (Angelo Badalamenti, Mulholland Drive) and Best Cinematography (Oliver Stapleton, The Shipping News).
1:33 - R for sexuality and language
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