Breaking and Entering film review

certificate_15

BREAKING AND ENTERING

Anthony Minghella directs his own original screenplay in Breaking and Entering, the first time he has done so since he made a notable debut in 1992 with Truly, Madly, Deeply. It's a middle-aged, middle-class treatise on life as we know it now, and Minghella uses the huge building works at King's Cross as the setting for a cross-cultural melting pot that sees comfy traditional Britain pitted against the new kids on the block, the immigrant community from Eastern Europe.

In the Western corner is Jude Law, who plays Will, a successful architect with plans to rejuvenate the notorious hinterland behind St Pancras into a green-field community. He is helped by his business partner Sandy (Martin Freeman), but hindered by a series of break-ins that deprive them of their most precious commodities, their shiny new Apple computers.

Both are suspicious of the Eastern Bloc that is taking up temporary residence in the neighbourhood before the bulldozers come in. A gang of Bosnian carwashers, a strangely-accented prostitute (Vera Farmiga), and straying further afield, an African cleaner Erika (Caroline Chikezie), for whom Sandy has a soft spot.

Notwithstanding his busy life at the office, Will is also troubled at home with an angst-ridden wife (Robin Wright Penn) and a severely hyperactive daughter. Large swathes of the film are taken up with Will's disenchantment at this relationship, as well as his burgeoning friendship with Amira (Juliette Binoche), the mother of one of the local immigrants who may be involved in the break-ins.

Minghella is aiming big here as he tries to intertwine the personal and the political. Yet it's not a wholly successful effort, partly as the dialogue often fails to ring true, and partly due to the casting of Law in the central role, both of which give the film a somewhat hollow feel. The film also has a disjointed aspect to it: Freeman's character and his potentially interesting relationship lead nowhere, while Vera Farmiga's role is the most bizarre onscreen prostitute since Leelee Sobieski's strange appearance in Eyes Wide Shut. As a result, it's likely to leave most viewers feeling cold, as there is really little to become attached to, and as for its effort to say something grand about the effect of immigration on contemporary society, it doesn't hold a candle to Michael Haneke's Hidden.

Paul Hurley