You can see what the movie is aiming at. “A Perfect Day” wants to be a blend of “Catch-22” and “M*A*S*H” — set during the Balkan War of the 1990s — full of black humor, with some cutting insights about the absurdity of war.
I wish it played like that. Because the storyline itself, adapted from a novel by Paula Farias, has fantastic possibilities. It’s the execution that gets muffed.
We begin with a corpse being pulled out of a small-town well. How the body got in there is a matter of speculation, but it will permanently foul the water if it isn’t yanked out in a few hours.
Unfortunately, the rope breaks. Which leads a group of “Aid Across Borders” workers to scour the countryside for a decent rope — and a way of cutting through the miles of red tape required to do a simple, good thing. (Novelist Farias was a member of Doctors Without Borders in the Balkans.)
The war-weary crew includes a couple of macho Americans, Mambru (Benicio Del Toro) and B (Tim Robbins), an easily-shocked Frenchwoman, Sophie (Melanie Thierry), and a Russian “conflict evaluator,” Katya (Olga Kurylenko). A local translator, Damir (Fedja Stukan), is also on board.
Katya’s arrival is especially vexing for Mambru, whose affair with her did not end well. More pressing issues do come up, such as dodging land mines and keeping cool around border guards. The movie doesn’t spell out which side is which, because it’s more interested in the overall craziness of the dilemma.
The situation, with its logistical hurdles and its way of circling around on itself, is ripe with potential. The body stuck in the well is also ripe — all the horror and bureaucratic headaches of war captured in one image.
But Spanish filmmaker Fernando Leon de Aranoa gets the tone wrong. Robbins is boorish, not funny, and Thierry’s character seems like an innocent from a different era.
The pop songs on the soundtrack — except for the aptly chosen tune to accompany the final sequence — come across as tunes for car commercials.
The one spot-on performance comes from Benicio Del Toro, who maintains an undercurrent of seen-it-all humor regardless of the circumstances. At this point in his career, Del Toro is a welcome, shambling presence in any movie. He’s good casting for the role, but it’s too bad the film around him couldn’t have been on target.
“A Perfect Day” (2 stars)
A group of aid workers travel through the war in the Balkans in the 1990s, faced with a “Catch-22” situation that only gets more absurd as it goes along. The movie’s got a great concept, and Benicio Del Toro is terrific, but the black-comedy tone feels off from the very beginning. With Tim Robbins, Olga Kurylenko.
Rating: R, for language, subject matter
Showing: Sundance Cinemas
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