When I went to see Chalet Girl, I wasn’t expecting much. I knew it was a romantic comedy where the average girl lands the older guy who just so happens to be stinking rich and way out of her league. I knew that. What I didn’t know, was just how painful it would be to endure the whole thing.
Kim used to be a pro-skateboarder but after her mum died in a tragic car accident (funny how characters always have to have a tragic past to somehow make them less two-dimensional), she packed it in and did what any teenage girl with a brain would do: absolutely nothing. Actually I lie, she did do something. By day she served fried chicken to annoying children and by night she enjoyed cleaning the house for her waste of space father, who she enjoys a bizarrely close relationship with in that she calls him by his first name and worships the ground he walks on, some implicit Freudian shit which is apparently supposed to go unnoticed.
Anyway, like you do she suddenly gets offered a job in Austria, a 4-month stint as a “chalet girl” (basically a servant in a posh family’s holiday home), starting tomorrow. Somehow, as well as visiting her mum’s grave and packing everything she’ll need for the next few months, she also manages to cook her dad 4 month’s worth of homemade lasagnes because it seems he will order 53870 cans of baked beans off the internet and live on beans on toast otherwise.
Another mental thing she does is promise her dad that because he doesn’t work and has ended up obese and in a lot of debt, she will send him all her tips (two hundred euros a week), and, being the lovely responsible parent that he is, he actually agrees to let her do this while he sits on his fat arse and watches daytime TV (he actually wants her money so much that he rings her up to complain when she spends some of it on ski-wear instead).
Upon arriving in Austria, she is met by a skinny blonde who seems like your stereotypical slut bitch but can’t resist calling everybody “babes” every 5 seconds and going from an intense dislike of poor Kim to a strong sister figure overnight.
Anyway, with the help of Mikki, a rather suspect middle-aged Finnish guy she meets on the first day, Kim decides that even though she’s never even seen a mountain prior to this trip, 4 months will be long enough to win the snowboarding championships so embarks on a ridiculous regime that involves a lot of “hilarious” face plants and “tragic” flashbacks of the car accident that killed her mother.
However, amidst all this, Kim also takes a shine to the posh family’s son Johnny (Westwick, who is certainly no Chuck Bass in this follow up to his Gossip Girl days). Johnny happens to be engaged to a girl who his family adore and who has been the love of his life for 5 years. However, when she breaks her leg and Johnny is “forced” to ask Kim to teach him some moves on the slopes instead of actually taking care of his poor girlfriend, the two end up in a not so unpredictable play fight which ends in a kiss, which of course culminates in them spending the night together. Johnny shows just what a gentleman he is when Kim takes her shirt off and he says “34B, knew it”. For some reason, she sleeps with him anyway and then calls him a “lying bastard” upon finding out he is engaged (although having spent 3 months with his fiancé, one does wonder how she didn’t notice before).
She flounces off and proceeds to win the competition (surprise surprise) and decides that because it’s a fairytale, she’ll forgive Johnny for being a cheating scumbag and the film ends with a lovely shot of them kissing in front of her adoring fans. Aww.
No comments:
Post a Comment