Birthday Girl: Russian Around.

Birthday Girl opens in cinemas on Thursday.

The irony of the end of Nicole Kidman’s personal partnership with Tom Cruise marking a flourishing of her professional life continues beyond Moulin Rouge and The Others.

Her role as a Russian mail order bride in Birthday Girl is further testimony of her growth as an actor; one who, unlike her ex- since he attained megastardom, is not only willing but also hungry to take risks.

A black romantic comedy might sound like an oxymoron, but this offbeat and original film proves that it isn’t, throwing into the mix social realism and satire on loneliness and cyberdating, and heist and road movie elements. Birthday Girl extrapolates the usual romantic comedy tension between the leads to vicious verbal and physical extremes with fabulously funny results.

Having won a Golden Globe award for as the pathologically ambitious lead in Gus Van Sant’s To Die For, Nicole was not surprisingly attracted to Birthday Girl’s unpredictability, and the challenge of playing a Russian.

“It was the way in which you couldn’t predict what was going to happen – it was funny in that the characters were really unusual. I suppose it was a black comedy, which is what I’m always drawn to. It’s sort of a black comedy, romantic comedy, thriller, quirky, weird film.”

“But I think it’s got a lot of heart to it as well, which is what I liked about it – you know the unlikely coupling of these two people, yet I think there’s something quite beautiful about how people who are so different can still be so right together.”

“Then the idea of playing a Russian girl – that was the thing that scared me as well, because it was the ‘Oh no, would I be able to pull this off’?”

“And I don’t look Russian at all,“ she laughs, “but it was also the thing that drew me to it because obviously it’s so far from me, so it’s really about creating a character which is what I love to do.”

Perfectionist that she is, Nicole admits, “I became pretty obsessed with the language – it’s a beautiful language and I thought, ‘Hmm, this is something I could really enjoy doing beyond the film so if I’m going to learn it I’m going to learn the grammar and I want to learn it the proper way.”

“So of course,” she chuckles, “I found this girl who worked at the Russian Embassy in Australia, she’d never worked on a film before and I just said teach me: teach me Russian, teach me how to speak as a Russian. I didn’t work with a dialect coach on the actual Russian, just worked the Russian girl.”

Director Jez Butterworth’s sense of irony was further reflected in his casting of French actor pals Mathieu Kassovitz (Amelie, writer/director of La Haine) and Vincent Cassel (La Haine, The Crimson Rivers) to play Nadia’s (Nicole’s) Russian ‘cousins’.

Then he also gave Englishman Ben Chapman, after five years of playing Americans (The Truth about Cats and Dogs, The Thin Red Line), a chance to use his natural accent as John, a lonely bank teller who orders a bride from the From Russian With Love website. To top it off, the film’s interiors were shot in Australia.

In character as well as plot the script also avoids the obvious, John not having the letter L stamped on his forehead or being totally socially clueless.

“Everybody has met people like John,” agrees Ben. “I worked in a bank for this, in a provincial bank in St Albans as research, but none of those guys has ordered a Russian mail order bride. But then you’ve just got to add a few ingredients before they have and you’re there.”

Adds Jez, who wrote the script with his brother Tom, “I think he’s one of those men who 10 years ago would have been fine, but the world has just turned once too many times and he’s just kind of left where he was.”

“And all his friends have left his home town and he’s doing the same thing day-in day-out and he has a routine and it’s just heading nowhere as far as he’s concerned. So he’s doing in a way a kind of heroic thing which breaking out of that and making this huge leap, and at the same time it’s kind of a villainous thing.”

“There’s nothing geeky about Ben and the character, who you could characterise if you wanted to as a loser; we thought we’d cast someone who was against that so that the reasons why he was stuck where he was weren’t obvious.”

Vincent believes, “If there is something dramatic about this movie, and that’s one thing I like about it, it talks about today’s loneliness. I mean it’s a guy who cannot find what he wants through a relationship in London – God knows that in London you can find a beautiful relationship if you work at it! So he goes through the Internet and I think a lot of people can relate to that.”