A Perfect Day

Rock star aid workers whip round a war zone in Spanish director Fernando Leon de Aranoa’s well-meant, but wobbly, tonal mishmash about the tragi-comic bureaucracy of post-conflict.

It’s 1995 “somewhere in the Balkans”. A large dead man has been dropped down a well, “Fatso” has stuck there some 12 hours and he’s spoiling the water supply. Rogueish Mambrú (Benicio del Toro) heads a team of humanitarians tasked with scooping out the corpse and restoring clean water. They have no rope, little time and plenty of bureaucracy to deal with. What should be a simple job bloats into farce. Mambrú and crew are thrown into an odyssey, beset with stony-faced locals, gun-toting tweens and those boneheads at the UN. The war is over, but the fight against inertia has only just begun. Trailer:

Like Michel Hazanavicius’s The Search before it, A Perfect Day is a tribute to the tenacity of men and women who risk their safety to spend their time feeling frustrated and useless. Like M*A*S*H it makes sport of the neutered dreams of those who sign up to help and find themselves blocked by protocol. But De Aronoa doesn’t have Altman’s poise and he struggles to straddle comedy and tragedy. The lurches in tone are brutal, accompanied by crass soundtrack choices that emphasise the jolt. In the aftermath of the team finding a body swinging from a tree in the back garden of a bombed-out house, de Aronoa cranks out Marilyn Manson’s cover of Sweet Dreams Are Made of This. It turns the heat up way too high. The drama is so over-cooked it bubbles out of the pot.

The dynamic between the team members is a little more elegant. Del Toro and Tim Robbins (playing a wily tomcat lifer called B) have fun with the sparkier bits of dialogue, even if their rapport crushes any hope of co-stars Olga Kurylenko and Mélanie Thierry making a dent. Kurylenko’s character, an ex- of Mambrú’s who’s auditing the team, is a nag; Thierry is is a wimp. Neither are allowed to do much that challenges the assumed dominance of the older, gnarlier men. “Nobody wears black panties to a war zone,” growls B appreciatively as Kurylenko’s character is forced to pee in public. For someone so effortlessly heroic, he comes off as a bit of an arse.

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