"Birthday Girl" is one of the very few British films, possibly the only one, to be set in St Albans, a cathedral city just north of London. John Buckingham, a bank clerk, orders a mail-order bride from Russia via the Internet. (She is described as a "bride", but as they never actually marry "mail-order mistress" would seem a more appropriate term). When the girl, Nadia, arrives it becomes clear that she cannot speak English, and John, who cannot speak Russian, considers asking her to return to Russia. When, however, he discovers how sexually uninhibited she is he decides to let her stay.
It soon transpires, however, that John is the victim of a scam. On Nadia's birthday two men, Yuri (who claims to be her cousin) and his friend Alexei, turn up at the house. At first John is happy to let them stay, but they show no sign of wanting to leave, and when John asks them to do so Alexei turns nasty, holding Nadia hostage and threatening to harm her unless John steals a large sum of money from the bank where works.
John pretends to comply with Alexie's demands, but as soon as he is out of the house he goes straight to the police who raid the house, rescue Nadia and arrest Yuri and Alexei. The two crooks receive lengthy prison sentences and John and Nadia live happily after as soon as she has learned enough English to say "I do". End of story.
Ignore everything I wrote in the last paragraph. I made it all up. That might have been the logical thing for John to have done, but then if he had acted logically there would have been no film, or at least not a very interesting one. Director Jez Butterworth evidently belongs to that school of film-makers who regard logic, plausibility and psychological consistency as being detrimental rather than conducive to good film-making. Instead of tipping off the police, John walks into the vault of his bank with two empty guitar cases and walks out with both full of banknotes. His colleagues seem either unaware of, or blithely unconcerned by, what he is doing. When he gets back to the house with the money, however, he finds out that Nadia, far from being the innocent victim of Yuri and Alexei, is actually their accomplice in the scam- indeed, she is Alexei's girlfriend.
The three Russians disappear with their loot. John, a sadder but a wiser man, hands himself into the police and is sent to jail but receives a lighter sentence because of the extenuating circumstances involved. End of story.
Again, ignore that last paragraph. I made it up. Now it is Yuri and Alexei's turn to do something bizarrely improbable. They disappear with the loot, leaving John tied up, but for some reason they also leave Nadia tied up alongside him. The ostensible reason given is that Alexei is angry because Nadia is pregnant with John's child, but both they and the scriptwriters have overlooked the fact that Nadia, who knows their true identities, is in possession of information which could put them in jail for a very long time indeed. That, I submit, would have been enough motivation for Alexei to swallow his resentment and avoid doing anything which might provoke Nadia to turn Queen's Evidence. John and Nadia go on the run and, remarkably, manage to evade detection even though John has now been identified as a suspected bank robber, his description has been widely circulated by the police and he is driving around the countryside in a highly distinctive bright orange sports car.
The casting seems just as bizarre as the plotting. Ben Chaplin as John is not too bad, but even though the other three main characters are all supposed to be Russian, none of them is actually played by a Russian. Nadia is played by Hollywood's favourite Aussie, Nicole Kidman. Presumably the film-makers cast her with an eye on the international market, but I'm afraid that the lovely Nicole did little except confirm my long-standing opinion that her undoubted talent for acting is not matched by an equal talent for picking the right film. (See also "Moulin Rouge", "The Stepford Wives", "Practical Magic" and several other turkeys of the same ilk). Yuri and Alexei are both played by French actors Mathieu Kassovitz and Vincent Cassel. God know why. The film-makers can't have had that big an eye on the French market. Large chunks of the dialogue are in Russian; I can't speak that language, but neither, apparently, can Kidman, Kassovitz and Cassel. Russians who have seen the film have described their accents as so inaccurate as to be barely comprehensible.
The film ends with John, disguised as Alexei, leaving for Russia with Sophia. We never learn what happens to them when they get there, but we are probably supposed to assume it is along the lines of "happily ever after". In real life, of course, John would probably end up in a Russian jail on a charge of entering the country on a false passport and then, when he had served his sentence, being extradited to Britain to stand trial for the bank robbery. "Birthday Girl", however, is the sort of film which has a very strained relationship with real life. Indeed, they are barely on speaking terms. 4/10
A goof. It is never explained how John, a modest bank clerk, can afford a massive five- or six-bedroomed detached house in St Albans, a notoriously expensive city to live with some of the highest property prices outside central London.