BREAKING AND ENTERING
London’s
changing, everyone says so. Jude Law in Breaking and Entering is actively
involved in the changes, being the landscape architect in charge of a project to
gentrify the Kings Cross area – but he also finds the changes hard to handle.
There’s a wild fox in his garden. There are immigrants everywhere; Kings Cross
itself is “an area in flux”, with smart public buildings cheek-by-jowl with
dingy back-streets where hookers still ply their trade. A cop wryly points out
that the canal – which Law plans to use “like calligraphy”, winding around
the new buildings – now runs through the place where he was born. A social
worker recalls the days when you could wallop juvenile delinquents. No more.
Things have changed.
Breaking
and Entering is a film about paralysis, and feeling helpless in the face of
radical changes. It’s also rather special in being a film by Anthony Minghella,
the British-born director who went Hollywood – making expensive spectacles
like Cold Mountain (2003) – but has now returned to the low-key
character dramas that made his name; Breaking recalls his debut, Truly
Madly Deeply (1991), also a film about paralysis. In that one, Juliet
Stevenson (who returns for a cameo, as a psychiatrist) was paralysed by the
death of her husband, lost in grief and unable to move on with her life; in this
one, Law’s paralysis is harder to pinpoint – but he’s mainly paralysed by
his own inability to be honest (“Maybe that’s why I like metaphors”) and a
sense of social chaos, inadequate solutions to pressing problems. He’s also
paralysed because he loves one woman but is married (or ‘married’) to
another.
The film
is wall-to-wall talk – Minghella started out as a playwright – yet it’s
filled with a yearning for silence. “Animals don’t talk. Because they
don’t lie,” Jude is told, and later Juliette Binoche (as the Other Woman)
asks him for sex, “not talk”. Talk is part of the therapy culture, civilised,
inadequate. Law’s dysfunctional family talk all the time, but “god forbid we
say what we actually mean”. Part of the paralysis is down to an excess of
manners, Middle-Class Britain’s hidden desire for something not so civilised,
wilder, more exotic – something real, like a Bosnian refugee who actually had
to flee civil war.
That
would be Binoche, whose pain goes deep, deeper than Law’s bourgeois neuroses;
she’s poor, and she lives on an estate, and her son is a thief. Talk won’t
solve her problems – maybe that's why he loves her. Her son is also into ‘parkour’,
the acrobatic running seen in Casino Royale, just like Jude’s autistic
stepdaughter loves doing somersaults; the kids are unabashedly physical, as if
in reproach to their paralysed parents. Then there’s the hooker who climbs
into Law’s car and says she’ll do anything. He just wants to talk, which is
typical.
The
film’s climax, when talk finally turns to action, is superbly poignant. What
comes before is smart but diffuse, often too explicit – as when someone
‘explains’ the fox in our hero’s garden: “It’s the one wild thing in
your life, and it makes you crazy” – and likely to bore the teenage crowd at
the multiplex (choose your audience carefully before watching this one). It’s
a self-conscious film, but it seems to come from the heart. Minghella uses
mirrors, shallow-focus, reflections in car windshields – even shoots through a
fishbowl! – to evoke a sense of flux and uncertainty, a sadly recognisable
feeling of life slipping out of one’s control. It’s the new multi-cultural
London, “and it makes you crazy”.