A Perfect Day (2014)

The war in Yugoslavia is ending and a group of aid workers find themselves stuck in bureaucratic structures that renders them unable to help. Their mission is to drag a dead person out from a well, so that the corpse won’t spoil the water. This is the set-up of Fernando Leon de Aranoa’s A Perfect Day, a film that tries to be rowdy comedy and social document all at once. Benicio del Toro and Tim Robbins play the tough guys who have grown cynically world-weary - they act like some kind of rock stars. As the well business lapses into a farce, it is his character that delivers the bitter lines about organizational fuck-up. Mélanie Tierry plays the newbie, the one with a working conscience. So, does it work? A perfect day is crass, but not always successful in its attempt to deliver a harshly comical image of aid work. The result is sometimes simply rather insensitive towards what it is in fact trying to do – the war that it chronicles is at times transformed into a mere background for slapstick and action - not to speak of blasting Marilyn Manson and Gogol Bordello tunes. The film's juxtaposition of the idealistic girl and the gnarly cynical male is tiresome and goes by the book in a cheap kind of way. Indeed, the cynical male cracks jokes to impress the sweet idealist girl - he laughs about getting laid and seeing his first corpse. Of course one could say that these things might exist in real life too, and that real people can be clichés and crack stupid and tasteless jokes. But the problem with A Perfect Day is that it does little to show what this reveals about aid work, bureacracy within organization or the psychological pressure of working in a war setting.