Sex can be messy, scary, and even borderline dangerous. But it's when love enters the picture that things get really kinky.

"Birthday Girl" is a comic thriller in the tradition of "Tie Me Up, Tie Me Down." But where that kink-comedy was just the sort of thing we might expect from the sexual-sensual Spaniard Pedro Almodvar, "Birthday Girl" wins its winks through surprise. This is kinky love from the nation that invented emotional repression, Great Britain.

Ben Chaplin plays John, a mild mannered bank clerk in small-town Britain. He leads a well-ordered life, so well-ordered that he thinks nothing of, well, ordering a bride from Russia from an on-line spouse service, "From Russia With Love."

"Where does it say you have to meet the love of your life at the local grocers?" is his rationale.

John figures he's hit the jackpot when Nadia (Nicole Kidman) is who he meets at the airport. Dead sexy, pale with a wounded doe look about her, she fills the physical bill he had in mind.

Unfortunately, she doesn't speak English. Repeated calls to the marriage arrangers get John nowhere.

So he rummages through her stuff and finds her baby pictures.

She rummages through his and finds his porn, specifically his bondage porn.

And we're off. For a while, anyway. The early scenes between a man and a woman who have nothing in common but one's odd sexual tastes and the other's desire to fulfill those desires are cute and kinky, in a kind of warmhearted way.

Then, director/co-writer Jez Butterworth, who gave us the mildly erotic "Mojo," flips between thriller, as Nadia turns out to be not what she seems, and romantic road comedy, as John and Nadia go off on the run together, terribly reluctantly.

Chaplin is nonplussed and ever-overmatched. First, he's a bank employee who silently absorbs the jabs of his boss. Then, he's someone who accepts that he can't get rid of this woman who did not come as advertised, and finally he becomes a man who can't cope with the Russian "cousins" who come to visit them and set the whole caper-lovers-on-the-run part of the film into motion.

But this is Kidman's movie, a jolting reminder of the sort of year this actress has had. She's absolutely believable as a Russian, warm and ruthless and very good at making the poetic turns of phrase that non-Russian movies always give to their Russian characters.

The story finds a new way to surprise us, even when the plot settles into well-worn ruts of chase, kidnapping, rescue and the inevitable trip to the airport.

Through it all, Kidman and Chaplin make a convincing couple (they fight, a lot).

Kinky never looked so cute.

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BIRTHDAY GIRL

4 stars (out of 5)

Cast: Ben Chaplin, Nicole Kidman, Vincent Cassel, Mathieu Kassovitz, Stephen Mangan.

Director: Jez Butterworth.

Running time: 1 hour, 33 minutes.

Industry rating: R (restricted) for sexuality and language (violence, too).

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(c) 2002, The Orlando Sentinel (Fla.).

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