Birthday Girl
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| Birthday Girl | |
|---|---|
 |
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| Directed by | Jez Butterworth |
| Produced by | Eric Abraham Steve Butterworth Diana Phillips |
| Written by | Tom Butterworth Jez Butterworth |
| Starring | Nicole Kidman Ben Chaplin |
| Music by | Stephen Warbeck |
| Distributed by | Miramax Films |
| Release date(s) | February 1, 2002 |
| Budget | $13,000,000 |
| IMDb profile | |
Birthday Girl is a 2001 British Film Four-backed film featuring Nicole Kidman as a Russian mail-order bride. It is directed by Jez Butterworth and stars Ben Chaplin and Vincent Cassel.
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[edit] Plot
John Buckingham (Ben Chaplin), a lonely and introverted bank teller, orders a mail-order bride Nadia (Nicole Kidman) from Russia on the Internet. John is uncomfortable and shy, but Nadia is sexually bold and John can't believe his good luck. Though Nadia cannot speak English and John cannot speak Russian, they soon bond. Later on, a man she introduces as her cousin Yuri (Mathieu Kassovitz) and his friend Alexei (Vincent Cassel) turn up to celebrate her birthday. Alexei soon shows that he has a temper. After a violent altercation, Alexei holds Nadia hostage and demands a ransom from John. John has grown to care for Nadia, and is forced to steal from his bank where he has worked for ten years. After the ransom is paid, he learns that the hostage incident is a hoax. Nadia, Yuri and Alexei are criminals, and Alexei is actually Nadia's boyfriend.
John learns that the trio have carried out the same scam on men from Switzerland and Germany, among others. They take him prisoner, strip him down to his underpants, and tie him to a toilet in a motel. He eventually manages to free himself, and quickly learns that Nadia has been left behind after her accomplices have fled. John gets dressed, and subsequently gets into a scrap with Nadia, who later reveals "My name is not Nadia," but Sophia.
Nadia gets into trouble after her boyfriend Alexei learns she is pregnant and John goes back to rescue her. They make common cause against the two Russian men, although John remains unsure whether or not he can trust her.
[edit] Cast
- Nicole Kidman as Sophia, alias Nadia
- Ben Chaplin as John
- Vincent Cassel as Alexei
- Mathieu Kassovitz as Yuri
[edit] Trivia
When released in Russian-speaking countries, Nicole Kidman's voice had to be dubbed over (along with the English voices), as her Russian, while sounding convincing to many Anglophones, was actually very poor, and at times barely comprehensible. The two Russian gangsters were played by French actors, and Kidman is originally from Australia. The director did not speak Russian, either.
Many scenes of the movie were shot in the English town Hemel Hempstead which made world news in 2005 as being the location of the Buncefield Oil Depot disaster.
Production staff needed about thirty minutes to get Ben Chaplin tied to the toilet. At one point, Chaplin was desperate to go to the bathroom, so they had to untie him. Then, they had to tie him up again, losing an hour of filming.
In several scenes, Yuri's beard is clearly peeling away from his face. Mathieu Kassovitz apparently arrived on set one day clean-shaven, and was fitted with a false beard.
A double for Nicole Kidman was used for the hotel-room fight scene between John and Nadia after John gets free because Kidman injured her knee.
