login/register

BREAKING AND ENTERING is interesting, character-driven drama. Will is a landscape architect who succeeds in business but finds his personal life is tougher to navigate. He has been with Liv for years, but it's difficult to connect with her due to her worry over her teenage daughter. When Will catches teenager Miro breaking into his office, he chases the thief home. He later meets the boy's mother, a Bosnian refugee. His anger at Miro is quickly transformed into attraction to his mother, further complicating his relationship with Liv.

Breaking and Entering is a fascinating, funny, and touching film about overlapping lives and different circumstances. Jude Law plays Will, an architect working on a development project near King's Cross - his project aims to make statements about the role of nature in modern life but stumbles as the offices are repeatedly broken into by freerunning crooks. These urban acrobats are the younger generation of a Bosnian crime ring, and, while Will comes into contact with them on one front (the damage to his business), he also uncertainly approaches from another side by befriending the mother of one of the freerunners, the seamstress Amira played by Juliette Binoche. As relationships develop and authorities tighten the net, it is not only the criminals who are put under pressure; Will's relationship with Amira complicates his own family life with Liv (Robin Wright Penn) and her borderline autistic daughter Beatrice (Poppy Rogers), a promising ballerina.

Despite the many characters and complex webs of relationships, Breaking and Entering never loses the viewer. It successfully paints a swarming world that exists off camera and continues between takes, and draws you into its world where moral decisions are not answered in simple, black and white terms. One example of Breaking and Entering's subtle approach to the modern world is the contrast between Ray Winstone's character (a policeman) and Mark Benton's (a social worker). The expected sympathies are reversed regarding the interests of Amira's freerunning son Miro (Rafi Gavron), the cop having the boy's interests and future in mind while the social worker takes a bullying, condescending approach not on Miro's side at all.

The freerunning scenes are exciting but sparse, wisely not milking the contemporary fascination with the sport, and there are moments of humour from several smaller characters such as a smart-mouthed Martin Freeman and The Departed's Vera Farmiga playing a cynical and philosophical prostitute.

Looking at the world through a sophisticated lense to pick up the real, unsimplified way the world operates, and providing amazing performances, particularly from Law and the two younger cast (both Rafi Gavron and Poppy Rogers rise to the challenge of acting alongside serious talents such as Binoche), Breaking and Entering is an intelligent and emotionally touching film.

The atmospheric and erotically charged Breaking and Entering reunites director Anthony Minghella with Jude Law (The Talented Mr. Ripley, Cold Mountain) and the haunting Juliette Binoche (The English Patient, for which she and Minghella won Academy Awards). Law fully invests himself as pre-occupied landscape architect Will Francis, who with his partner (Martin Freeman from The Office), is heading a gentrification project in London's seedy, crime-plagued King's Cross neighborhood. At home, he and Liv (Robin Penn Wright), his morose Swedish-American girlfriend of 10 years, are increasingly estranged over the demands of his job and of caring for Liv's autistic daughter, a 13-year-old aspiring gymnast. Will, hiding his identity, begins an affair with Amira (Binoche), the mother of a youth who has twice ransacked Will's office. Amira is a Bosnian refugee with a fierce survival streak that is not above blackmail when she learns who Will is.

This is Minghella's first original screenplay since his little-known romantic gem Truly Madly Deeply. The dialogue has Woody Allen pretensions: A cleaning woman who comes under suspicion for the break-ins invokes Kafka. A prostitute (Vera Farmiga giving the film's liveliest performance) has a philosophical bent. Will himself ham-handedly explains how he much prefers metaphors to straightforward communication (he'd love this film's title). An art-house film with an A-list cast and wrenching performances, Breaking and Entering couldn't get arrested in theatres, but it is a fine addition to Crash and other liberal-minded "them and us" dramas. --Donald Liebenson

	Enter your search terms Submit search form
	Web www.filmcritique.co.uk