journal features

movie review - Birthday Girl

the journal of Michael Werneburg

twenty-seven years and one million words

Toronto, 2003.03.29

This is a movie about a quiet Englishman who - after years in a mind-numbing job at a bank, and years of loneliness - decides to send away for a mail-order bride from Russia. What he gets instead, is a scam. He soon finds himself stripped and tied up to a toilet in a hotel bathroom, having just robbed his own bank.

The strange thing is, that's when the movie gets uninteresting. It's actually the build-up that carries the first 75 minutes or so of this movie quite ably. It's only after he's freed himself and found the 'bride' tied up in the room next to him that the plot begins to falter. Which is surprising, because the scenes that eventually build-up to the betrayal are all very good (Vincent Cassel applies his usual intensity to great effect, here).

While the ending actually pulls this one out of the fire, somewhat, it's the muddled twenty minutes that get us from that bathroom to the final scene in an airport that hurt the film.

Not recommended.

rand()m quote

Immature poets imitate mature poets steal bad poets deface what they take and good poets make it into something better or at least something different. The good poet welds his theft into a whole of feeling which is unique utterly different than that from which it is torn the bad poet throws it into something which has no cohesion. A good poet will usually borrow from authors remote in time or alien in language or diverse in interest.

—T.S. Eliot