WHAT do you get when you reunite the screenwriter of “Love Actually” (one of the funniest, most poignant movies of 2003) with the brilliant actor in that movie, Bill Nighy?
For HBO (in cahoots with the BBC), that combo spells “The Girl in the Café,” a movie with a message, which somehow is still able to deliver laughs. In parts.
The message – shockingly, disgustingly – is that 30,000 (yes, 30,000) children die of extreme poverty every single day. Let that sink in a minute.
The horrifying message is somehow well-wrapped around a strange little love story about a man, Lawrence (Nighy), who is a sort of lonely guy who works all the time and who meets Gina (Kelly Macdonald), an off-center woman, in a London coffee and tea café.
Lawrence, a bureaucrat with a soul, happens to work in an office of the British government which is preparing to go to the G8 Summit Meeting in Reykjavik, Iceland.
At this summit, eight of the top world leaders are going decide the goals and money that are to be appropriated for combating world hunger and poverty.
OK, it’s not your everyday love story.
Lawrence’s body language talks for him. His every action is an uncomfortable attempt to look comfortable with himself when in fact he’s miserably unhappy in his own skin.
We’ve all seen this guy – the shy man who is trying desperately hard not to look foolish. It’s a joy and a misery to watch him.
Macdonald, on the other hand, plays Gina as a strangely enigmatic woman – obviously several years Lawrence’s junior – who isn’t exactly charming or lovable or anything really, but she is somehow compelling.
On a whim, Lawrence invites Gina to attend the conference with him in Iceland – even though he worries what his colleagues will think about him bringing a woman along.
When they arrive in Iceland, there are protestors at the airport to greet them. Gina seems oblivious.
This is overshadowed by the dating disaster that awaits at the hotel, where Lawrence discovers that the hotel didn’t make separate room arrangements. You will laugh out loud and cringe at the same time when he tries to explain to her that he didn’t plan it.
What happens after that will make you wonder: is she, perhaps, really a protestor who infiltrated the proceedings – on the arm of this lonely man?
The message is important, but somehow the message takes over the medium here and you may feel like you’ve been bashed upside the head by the time the movie ends.
That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t catch it, however.
—
“The Girl in the Café”
[***] (Three stars)
Saturday night at 8 on HBO
