Jez Butterworth (the director) and his brother Tom (both of them coauthors of this appealing but hermetic British comedy) are marking time.
After Mojo, their last Pinteresque piece of East End intimidation, St Albans seems too cosy a setting for such edgy talents. They make it all bigger-looking by casting Nicole Kidman (before she became today's superstar) and shooting Home Counties suburbia in handsome wide-screen.
Ben Chaplin, in a role Hugh Grant would have cracked open to wilder effect, is outwardly a meek and mild, unmarried bank clerk who imports an "internet bride" from Russia. Nadia (Nicole Kidman) arrives, and can't speak a word of English. Kidman, in fact, hardly speaks at all for half the film, but her sharp, taut, trim, lean figure in maxi-coat and mini-skirt stands as a visual exclamation mark for all she leaves unsaid.
Communication between them only gets going when she finds Chaplin's cache of bondage mags and sexy videos. The idea behind Birthday Girl, I think, is to infuse an English sitcom with a bit of un-English exoticism and put Anglo-Saxon reticence under strain - or, rather, restraint. But the comedy only acquires a cutting edge when two strange Russians burst in on Nadia's birthday, her cousin and a backpacking buddy, played by Vincent Cassel and Matthieu Kassovitz.
They're feral intruders, boisterous and playfully brutal, whose gipsy-like disdain for convention soon has the conservatory strung up with shot rabbits, and Chaplin cringing at their implied threat to him and Kidman: a bit like Ayckbourn rewritten by Pinter.
The "surprise" twist can be spied coming way down the road, but I mustn't give it away. It turns a joy-through-kinkiness relationship that the young Polanski would have liked exploring, into a conventionally zany farce like Scorsese's After Hours, where Griffin Dunne was the timid chap lost downtown at the mercy of coercive figures.
Kidman's Russian vagrant is unpredictable, hence watchable; Kassovitz's hottempered Russian looks as if he'd kill for the contents of a mini-bar. Nice, but not enough.
Birthday Girl
Cert: cert15
