The Girl in the Café (2005)

It's funny, it's tense, it features two great performances from two actors and the director expertly creates a web of odd tension where you actually don't know what is happening for the majority of the run time.

The best films of this genre always show a path and provide a takeaway for being a better person.

There are moments in this movie where the great movie it could've been peek out... They're fleeting, here, but they're worth savoring, and they happen often enough to make it worth your while.

The story, direction, characters, and writing/dialogue is akin to taking a tranquilizer shot to the neck, but everything else was so well done.

The Girl in the Café is a British TV movie that stars Bill Nighy as Lawrence, a mild and unprepossessing British civil servant and Kelly MacDonald as Gina,a young woman whom Lawrence has met in a café.It was written by Richard Curtis and directed by David Yates.The film tells the story of Lawrence, a civil servant working for the Chancellor of the Exchequer, who falls in love with Gina, a young woman whom he meets by chance in a London café. Lawrence takes Gina to a G8 summit in Reykjavík, Iceland, where she confronts the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom over the issue of third world debt and poverty in Africa, much to Lawrence's embarrassment and the anger of his employers. However, he realizes that she is right and tries to help persuade the Chancellor and others at the summit to do something about the issues concerned.The burgeoning relationship between these two seemingly mismatched souls is obscured by egomania, xenophobia, and foot-dragging. Ultimately, the time comes when both Lawrence and Gina must make crucial decisions, with not only their own future but also the future of humankind in the balance.This is one fun and entertaining film about life, love and most amazingly how one person can make a difference in the world. Also,it has a lot of laughs and a great message about the present times.And most of all, Nighy and Macdonald have never been better than in their work here as they carry the film effectively.

We all know, deep in our selves what we can do that we are not. And we suspect what that could mean, so there is always a place that a movie like this can touch. If you haven't yet seen it, its a romance in the traditional movie sense, or at least it promises to be. And once it has you in that groove, with two damaged souls together in a foreign country, it switches to a different sort of fantasy: saving Africa. But as we've been inserted into the thing by one of the most powerful target stories ever discovered — the romance — we flow into it with different eyes. Its a matter of committing. Just where in an ordinary date movie where the couple commits to each other over swelling music, here we have the 8 finance ministers (the G7 plus Russia) committing to do what we know can be done. Or do they? The movie ends with strong ambiguity, with the worst option being that someone who could, stood up. See the engineering, the co-opting of one form for another purpose? See how deftly we are guided to where we want to be, to want to do something? See how wonderfully sticky these target stories are?I should warn you that if you see this, you will either come away a bit more likely to actually do something. Or you will not, in which case you will plant a seed of self-loathing that may be too much to bear.The actors here have very apt instincts, instincts that both work and are okay for TeeVee for which this was made. The stage is so small because the small screen cannot envelop two souls. So you have to do this back and forth business where the relationship has to be carried in faces and timing. I assume dialogs were shot with two cameras simultaneously.There are three actors involved here: the two we normally see: the reluctant lovers stumbling into a future together, and a third, the politician who gets seduced into the story. In order for the transference bit to work, the two need to seduce each other according to movielaws close enough to what we know we buy it. Then they as a unit, a joined soul need to seduce the politician. Imagine the challenge for the actors.It works. The writing on this is so clean, so delicately balanced, and yet so forcefully energetic that I must go and watch Blackadder. I see the writer here did those, many of them. Ted's Evaluation -- 3 of 3: Worth watching.

I love watching Bill Nighy. He's got the emotional range most actors envy. Doubt this? Try watching SHAUN OF THE DEAD and then LOVE ACTUALLY and you'll see what I mean. He can be dry as a bone one minute (Shaun of the Dead) and funnily spirited the next (Love Actually).So when I learned that he'd been in an Emmy winning TV movie, I leapt at the chance to see it.THE GIRL IN THE CAFÉ is your basic character story with some fine acting ...if a bit stilted. The stilted feel really isn't that big of a surprise considering this was a made-for-TV flick. Although there was some nudity (which I'm sure was not shown on U.S. television and saved for DVD), the story does have that prime-time feel to it rather than big screen chops.The story is that of Lawrence (Bill Nighy) and Gina (Kelly Macdonald), two lonely souls who meet one day in a café. Lawrence works for the government as an analyst who's preparing for the G8 summit in Iceland. Gina is ...well ...we're not quite sure in the beginning what Gina does. But she's attractive and Lawrence and she chat briefly during the lunch hour. They arrange a second "date" and meet later that week. Lawrence confides much of his job to Gina, telling her about Britain's battle to lead the fight against third world poverty and AIDS, but also mixing his own sense of defeat into the conversation, knowing that much of what he's doing will be bartered down to almost nil come summit-time talks.Gina seems to take most of this in stride, hardly raising an eyebrow at the horrors of money over meals that Lawrence feeds her mind. That is until Lawrence invites her to accompany him to Iceland for the G8 talks.Time and again Gina opens her mouth during high-level dinners and lets spew her mind about the number of dead and dying in third world countries that Lawrence told her in confidence. Battling his job versus his growing attraction for Gina, Lawrence risks all by keeping her at his side.In the end we learn that Gina's past is directly connected with death and that she's not working because of her recent release from prison.Although Kelly Macdonald does an admirable job as the lost but vocal Gina, her lines seemed overly-rehearsed or set to a teleprompter, while Billy Nighy delivers his in an uncomfortable fashion befitting a man who has poor woman skills.The dangers of losing oneself in a thankless job are hit hard within the film's framework, while also showing the battle we forge when trying to form bonds with those of the opposite sex. All of this is done with the G8 Summit looming heavily in the political background, making for some strikingly nervous dialogue that you know will be coming from Gina as the film continues.In the end, this is a good made-for-TV film that Bill Nighy fans should check out.

I stumbled across this film yesterday on BBC Prime and was hooked right from the start. Bill Nighy is mesmerizing as an almost autistically shy financial researcher who meets a similarly awkward young girl in a café (brilliantly played by Kelly MacDonald) and invites her to a G8 conference in Reykjavik, where she becomes, quite literally, his mouthpiece.As usual in great theatre, as much is said in the silences as with words, and the shackles of shyness between the two main characters is played out against the backdrop of negotiations where diplomacy and compromise similarly hamper the achievement of real results.It didn't surprise me to discover that the writer was Richard Curtis, who is clearly the best of British at the moment and, while not as glossy as 4 Weddings or Notting Hill, it's finally more satisfying. The supporting cast is superb and includes minor gems from Penny Downie (who looks remarkably like Juliet Stevenson) and Ken Stott. My only criticism is that the action moves a little too slowly; I think they could have cut 5 or 10 minutes without altering the impact.Humour, pathos and a non-preachy message. I wonder when Hollywood will rediscover how to make movies like this?