"The Girl In The Café" is a fairy tale of two very shy people falling in love with each other. One of them happens to work for the Chancellor of the Exchequer, preparing for a G-8 summit, which gives the movie a slight political stance. As lovely as Kelly MacDonald and the ever so admirable Bill Nighy were playing their parts, I couldn't really connect to the their characters, Lawrence and Gina. Lawrence's shyness comes very close to absolute dullness, whereas Gina behaves rather selfishly when she argues with Lawrence's boss all the time without thinking of the consequences. The political aspect makes this movie seem unbalanced. It starts out as a romance (and a very slow moving one at that) and all of a sudden it becomes this plea for stopping poverty in the third world. Of course, it's hard to take this plea too seriously when the whole problem is simplified by Gina so much. Sure, the movie makes clear that that's the key to the problem: getting down to the essence of things and not over-complicating everything when it really just takes the will to make a change for this world to become a better place. As much as I would like to believe in this moral, I can't. Its intentions are good, but "The Girl In The Café" is merely a half-baked fairy tale borrowing heavily from "Lost In Translation" in that its main characters are two alienated people in a foreign country falling in love with each other (or not). It's a nice little movie, but from IMDb's rating I was expecting more.
Review of The Girl in the Café
