The absence of any major American films from this year’s Cannes Film Festival competition allowed room for some French films to sneak in. The Birthday Party aka Histoires de la Nuit is a film which would have never otherwise been allowed to compete for the Palme d’Or. It’s the kind of mid-budget schlockly thriller that studios used to churn out every other week, which are now slowly starting to be made again since they don’t need massive special effects budgets. The Birthday Party is nothing to celebrate, but it is definitely entertaining, and writer-director Léa Mysius definitely hit her brief.
Unsuccessful farmer and husband Thomas (Bastien Bouillon) lives on his for-sale remote family farm with his civil-servant wife Nora (Hafsia Herzi) and their ten-year-old daughter Ida (Tawba El Gharchi). Some of the farm buildings have already been sold off to painter Cristina (Monica Bellucci) who expensively renovated them into a high-end live-in studio. Ida and Cristina get on well but there’s tension between the adults, considering they live about twenty paces apart with no one else around for a few miles. Thomas and Nora are not in great financial shape, plus Nora is so preoccupied by a potential promotion at work she’s barely speaking with Thomas. Ida is also furious with Nora for making her delete a cute TikTok of the family dancing in the cowshed that got 60,000 views. The farm’s isolation is such that when a stranger knocks on Cristina’s door, Cristina is polite but extremely wary. But on the night of Nora’s birthday party the stranger comes back. His name is Flo (Paul Hamy, who probably loathes his resemblance to Tom Hardy being mentioned) and this time his brothers are with him. One is Bégue, confusingly called Stutt in the English subtitles (Alan Delhaye, who will be bragging about what he gets to do in this part for the rest of his life) and the other is the much older Franck (Benoît Magimel having a wonderful time). Bégue puts a knife to Cristina’s throat and makes himself at home. Meanwhile Flo and Franck go ruin Nora’s birthday party.
There’s a very nineties feel to all of the following silliness. Franck busies himself making Thomas feel bad about himself, as a person and as a man. He also goes around yelling at everybody, or worse, while simultaneously getting mad at everyone that Ida seems afraid. Ida is of course less afraid than mad at her mom. Movies love to pretend that there are children out there who aren’t fazed by strange men waving guns around inside their own home, but certainly an angry, quiet child is more entertaining to watch than a screaming, traumatised one. Over in Cristina’s studio there’s a duel of wits going on, between a woman who believes in painting the gaps between things, and a man who didn’t mind his years in a mental hospital because of all the opportunities it provided him to think about liminal spaces. Your everyday problems. Flo meanwhile sees himself as a reasonable man, the only thing between the world and the unpleasant urges of his brothers, meaning he’s the most unpredictable wild card of them all. Of course pretty much everything that happens here is predictable.
Well, almost everything. The final plot twist is so silly someone in the Cannes screening I attended actually shouted “Bravo” and led a sarcastic round of applause. But it’s the moment after that which sticks in my mind, where everyone left is just quietly waiting for the police to arrive. There’s a sense of exhaustion combined with a clear sense that the violence is over, and even the people who did awful things are shocked and worn out and sitting in silence. It’s a shame that Ms. Mysius can’t go back and restart this movie from that moment on, because that unseen aftermath would have been vastly more interesting than what’s shown here. For a capably made minor entertainment The Birthday Party will hit the spot, but it’s nothing to put a party hat on for.
The Birthday Party recently played at the Cannes Film Festival.
Learn more about the film at the Cannes site for the title.
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