Birthday Girl By Rick Curnutte Richard A. Curnutte, Jr. is the Editor of The Film Journal. He has studied English and Film at Ohio University and The Ohio State University.

The trite, wrongminded Birthday Girl, is one of the most confounding and sporadically ineffective films I've seen in years. Ben Chaplin plays a sadsack English banker, a loser so awash in his own dire tedium that he goes to the Internet to find, well, "love", which comes in the form of a Russian mail-order bride, Nadia (Kidman).

What follows is a confusing mess of a story, in which Chaplin and Kidman engage in rough, kinky sex, only to be distant and morose in the rest of their lives. The filmmakers might have been attempting some sort of treatise on the way in which contemporary adults use sex to cross boundaries (Nadia doesn't speak English; well, not at first), but what really comes across is a misguided attempt at eroticism, combined with comedy and, finally, a downward spiral into traditional thriller trappings.

Nadia's "cousin" shows up and it's revealed that she's merely a con artist, out to take advantage of schleps like Chaplin.

Birthday Girl is a real train wreck of a production. Never sure when to play it straight or when to go for laughs, the film steers into absurdity in the final moments, even going so far as to opt for an insanely ludicrous "happy" ending.

                                                                 © FILM JOURNAL 2002