Male-Order Bride

Birthday Girl
***

Sasha Stone
Mirror film critic

   The way to a man’s heart is through his fetish. So goes the driving idea behind “Birthday Girl,” a film about a mail-order bride scenario gone wrong. If you’ve been paying attention, the trailer has already given away most of the film, but if you care to be surprised you might not want to read this review.
   John (Ben Chaplin) is a quiet bank teller who seeks a bride via a service called “From Russia With Love” that hooks up lonely guys with desperate Russian women eager to escape poverty. Maybe you’ve seen the stories on 20/20 where the men seek out more “traditional” women who will please and obey if a man has enough money to keep them happy.
   At first, this is what you think you’re getting into with “Birthday Girl,” but soon it becomes clear that Nadia (Nicole Kidman) comes with a higher price. Two Russian thugs (played by Vince Kassel and Mathieu Kassovitz) show up on the scene on Nadia’s birthday and threaten to kill her if John doesn’t rob the bank he works for and give them money. Once the money is delivered, Nadia’s affections are retracted — her true love for Thug #1 is revealed. Not only that, but she’s pregnant with his baby.
   Poor John. No job, no home, no Russian bride. But the film is even more clever than we’ve come to think. When first Nadia comes to live with John, she finds his porn magazines that are basically all about women being tied up. John essentially falls for Nadia because she’ll “go there” with him without shame. Nadia walks around with bruises on her wrists and marks on her back, all in the name of sexual play. When John is outsmarted by the Russian gang, he himself is tied up — the violence becomes real.
   There is a horribly funny scene where John is hog-tied to the toilet and Thug #2 tries to comfort him by showing him photos of all the men who’d been double crossed by Nadia. Not only has John been fooled, but his entire life has been turned upside down, from his fetishes to his fears.
   “Birthday Girl” is a fairly satisfying film to watch — but, ultimately, it can’t quite hold its own against the force of Nicole Kidman’s performance. Kidman is becoming one of those actors who has such a strong desire to prove her versatility that she opts for one extreme heaped upon another, like Cate Blanchett and Helen Hunt.
   To be fair, this isn’t Kidman’s fault. The timing was just bad. “Birthday Girl” was in the can some two years ago but sat on Miramax’s shelf for reasons that haven’t been made clear. Had it come out even a year ago, Kidman might have gotten deserved credit for the performance — as it is, it seems like too much up against “The Others,” where she plays a tightly sewn, freaked-out mother and “Moulin Rouge,” where she plays a dying burlesque star.
   On the other hand, “Birthday Girl” has a few other things going for it — like the wonderful Ben Chaplin (“The Truth About Cats and Dogs”), who plays John with an admirable reserve. And, of course, Kassovitz, last seen romancing Audrey Tautou in “Amelie,” is so camera-friendly, you end up wishing he was in every shot.
   What “Birthday Girl” really needed, if I may be so bold to say, is a non-star in female lead. The focus of the film needn’t have been how well Nicole Kidman can do a Russian accent (which she does quite well). A lesser-known actress, perhaps one with a little less wattage, would have better served the film as a whole. And, maybe, it would have been a star-making part. As it is, you never quite believe Kidman the actress would be satisfied just playing a Russian bride, so the plot twist is inevitably weakened.
   As with “To Die For,” and to an extent “The Others,” “Birthday Girl” is yet another example where Kidman seems to be acting in a different movie from everyone else.
   What Kidman is turning out to be, though, is the best femme fatale of our age — a woman who is irresistible yet icy cold. For all of her talent and beauty, it’s Kidman’s heart that is most hard to find, which, for femme fatales, isn’t a bad thing at all.