I’m not sure how much I can say about Girl in the Cafe, a great little TV movie I’ve had the pleasure to catch in cable a couple of times, without sounding like an infatuated schoolboy. Calling it Lost in Translation with a brain would be doing it a disservice, since it brings that other movie to the front, which had a lot of style and Bill Murray’s great acting going for it - but very little else. A better analogy might actually be Bridges of Madison County steeped into current issues. It realizes that romance will only get you so far, and manages to spends some time on matters that the filmmakers believe are important without letting these contentious topics overwhelm the movie.
To borrow a line from the film, it’s tender and true, and that’s unusual.
Perhaps its greatest realization, or at least the one that’s closest to me, is that the heart of compromise is being able to pick your own degree of failure. The fact that along the way they manage to tell a triumphant little love story with the always great Billy Nighy and Kelly Macdonald is just the icing on the cake.
If this movie just happens to to be seen by more people, it might be able to bring more attention to the real problems of the developing countries and the absurdities of government subsidies than all the red iPods in the world.