I guess the range of reaction is faint praise/honorable miss.
Breaking And Entering
Mike Goodridge in Toronto 14 September 2006
Dir/scr: Anthony Minghella. UK. 2006. 119mins.
Anthony Minghella’s first contemporary film since Truly Madly Deeply in 1991, Breaking And Entering is an ambitious but disappointing affair revolving around middle class folk from North London in crisis. Although handsomely produced and featuring one or two noteworthy performances, it is hijacked by a surprising lack of plausibility, both in the actions and emotions of its characters.
Audiences will find it hard to like or respond to the lead character Will Francis, a privileged architect in a lifeless long-term relationship whose search for connection leads him to a Bosnian Muslim refugee. Will is an unusually self-absorbed and humourless lead character and Minghella’s male muse Jude Law cannot render his behaviour any more understandable in the flesh than it was presumably written on the page.
Specialised filmgoers will respond to the film-maker’s name, the cast and the prospect of a smart adult drama which treads some of the same ground as Naked, Dirty Pretty Things or Intimacy. Word-of-mouth won’t catch fire, however; the cultural specificity of its London setting will inhibit its reach in the US (opens Dec 8 in NY/LA), while scrutiny from the aggressive media will be unusually fierce in the UK (opens Dec 1).
The convoluted storyline contains a host of themes from the human cost of urban renewal to the relationship of man to nature, the aftermath of the Balkan war to the influence of Britain’s enormous immigrant population; from the power of motherhood to the impact of difficult children on the family unit.
The film starts with a voiceover from Will announcing that he and his Swedish girlfriend of many years – Liv (Wright Penn) – have lost touch with each other’s needs and that their relationship is stagnant. She has given up her career as a documentary film-maker to care for her daughter Bea (Rogers), an autistic 12-year-old obsessed by gymnastics, and is unable to let Will enter their circle of two.
He is partnered with Sandy (Freeman) in a prosperous landscape architecture firm called Green Effect which is working on a (fictional) job to redirect the canal through the heart of the (real) reconstruction programme in the grimy King’s Cross area, infamous for its high crime rate and prostitution. The two have invested in new offices adjacent to the construction site and the drama begins as their Apple computer equipment is dropped off by a delivery firm run by Serbian immigrants.
Unbeknownst to them, the Serbs are planning to steal the equipment back the same night. The gymnastic nephew of one of them – Miro (Gavron) – breaks in through the glass ceiling and quickly disarms the alarm before letting in his co-conspirators. The team pulls off the heist twice in succession, causing Will and Sandy to start their own improbable night-time stakeout of their own offices in an attempt to catch the thieves.
While the depression-prone and impenetrable Liv seeks help from a therapist (Stevenson), Will starts to look outside the relationship for fulfilment, engaging in a platonic friendship of sorts with a sassy Russian hooker (Farmiga) who joins him on his stakeouts. One night as the two sip coffee, he sees Miro clambering down the office wall and sets out on foot in pursuit.
He follows him to the bleak council estate where Miro lives with his mother Amira (Binoche), a Bosnian Muslim still suffering from the war in Bosnia which killed her Serb husband and has left her 15-year-old son spiralling into a life of truancy and petty crime.
Rather than reporting the location of the thief to the police – here represented by implausibly well-meaning CID officer Ray Winstone – Will starts courting the reticent Amira (breaking and entering into her heart?), at first pretending to need her tailoring services. Knowing that Miro will know who he is, he leaves his card with her, suggesting that Miro comes to the Green Effect offices to pursue a nascent interest in architecture.
By the time Will gets Amira into bed, she has discovered that he knows her son is a criminal and thinks Will has betrayed her. So she sets about her own deceit, taking compromising pictures of Will with her while he sleeps.
Meanwhile Bea gets involved in an accident on the construction site, bringing Will’s relationship with Liv to crisis point. When Miro is arrested, Will realises that he has jeopardised his life’s true love.
Most compelling here are Binoche and 16 year-old newcomer Gavron as the refugees. The French actress, who of course won an Oscar for Minghella’s The English Patient, is the most convincing of the three females all affecting accents not their own (Wright Penn and Farmiga are both American). Binoche inhabits the role of protective mother and war-wounded soul with a conviction that is one of the film’s only authentic elements. Gavron is an exciting new face as the fatherless teenager with a good heart who is goaded on by his Serbian uncle to continue stealing.
But the film chooses not to make the Bosnians its principal focus, placing the main emphasis on the chilly rich couple as they sip Pinot Grigio, bicker about their daughter and look unhappy yet gorgeous in their palatial house. By the film’s end, Bosnian mother and son have packed up and gone back to Sarajevo, and self-satisfied Will and dour Liv are back on track.
Quite what life lessons either rich family or poor family have learned from their brushes with the other remains unclear as the sleek score by Gabriel Yared and Underworld heralds the end credits.
Breaking and Entering
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Two reviews:
Breaking and Entering
By TODD MCCARTHY
Variety
The possible upsides of lying and being burglarized are among the numerous topics held up to the light for close examination in "Breaking and Entering." Anthony Minghella's film is conspicuously thoughtful and civilized as it provides a close-up snapshot of particular aspects of life in London at this moment. Entirely respectable in every way, it nonetheless has a very cool body temperature and thus likely will inspire polite admiration rather than excitement among viewers, which looks to limit how far it will go -- at least in North America -- to relatively upscale situations.
After big international productions "The English Patient," "The Talented Mr. Ripley" and "Cold Mountain," this is the first time Minghella has worked from his own original screenplay since his debut film, "Truly, Madly, Deeply." It's very much the picture of a writer taking stock of the society and city in which he lives, sorting things out in his own mind in a way that will prove intellectually engaging and meaningful for an audience.
The public that will respond to his musings is mostly the same one that reads books and attends serious theater, the gentrification class that is now gingerly moving into the film's very specific setting, the dicey but quickly changing King's Cross area in North London. King's Cross Station is known to the world as the embarkation point of Harry Potter's Hogwarts Express, but the real neighborhood surrounding it has long teemed with immigrants and criminals.
The face of King's Cross is now being altered by England's biggest urban renewal project, and characters very much like Will Francis (Jude Law) who, with partner Sandy (Martin Freeman), has opened a high-end landscape architecture office in the area. In short order, the building is broken into not once but twice and robbed of all its high-tech equipment. Laying in wait at night for the intruder to strike yet again, Will sees him and chases him far enough to know what flat he has run into.
Will is most annoyed at the fact that his "whole life" is on his stolen laptop. That life consists of a well-appointed but trying home life with girlfriend Liv (Robin Wright Penn), a Scandinavian woman with a 13-year-old daughter, Bea (Poppy Rogers), who doesn't eat or sleep and compulsively practices gymnastics day and night. This situation deeply concerns Liv, a depressive herself whose therapy sessions with Will cast light on the deficiencies in their relationship.
The gradually unfolding story has Will making the acquaintance of the young burglar's attractive mother, Amira (Juliette Binoche), a Bosnian refugee and tailor to whose flat he brings some clothes for repair. Will says nothing of the crimes, but verifies the guilt of Amira's son by finding his stuff in the kid's room. In turn, the 15-year-old son, Miro (Rafi Gavron), finds the business card Will has left at the flat and now knows the game is up.
With things slowly atrophying at home with Liv, Will draws closer to Amira and rashly instigates an affair, prompting unsettling feelings. Amira, who would like to return to Sarajevo where her husband died, is vulnerable on every level.
What happens thereon involves several curious turns of emotions and justice, of both the legal and ethical varieties, leading to an almost startlingly upbeat and resolved result for all concerned. As such, this is one of the optimistic contemporary dramas of recent times. Or perhaps it's just wishful thinking.
Pic is absorbing, but in a decidedly low-key way. Partly this stems from Law's character, who is polite and imperturbable to a fault. As he at one point remarks, "I tidy up," a phrase that could be applied to his function with his family, Amira and her son, his office and the neighborhood. But one seldom really knows what's going on inside him, which is a problem when he begins spending time with Amira. Law's reading of Will is credible but lacks force, which may or may not be intentional.
Even more inscrutable is Liv, who suffers from "Scandinavian spells." A frustrated Will asks her point-blank what she wants, and it's impossible to know the answer; as good an actress as she is, Wright Penn can't clarify it. A related problem is her daughter, whose condition is so weird one can't get a handle on what to make of it.
Binoche, physically unchanged as ever, plays Amira's controlled anguish with skill, and Gavron is a very good-looking kid with presence. Vera Farmiga has a high old time in her brief role as an Eastern European hooker who would like to make a client out of Will.
Benoit Delhomme's lensing has an understated elegance, and Lisa Gunning's supple editing and Gabriel Yared and Underworld's score is frequently working to achieve emotional turbulence and counterpoint.
----------------------------------------------------
Breaking and Entering
By Kirk Honeycutt
Hollywood Reporter
TORONTO -- "Breaking and Entering," the first movie Anthony Minghella has directed from a screenplay of his own since his impressive 1991 debut, "Truly Madly Deeply," relates a commonplace story about a couple whose love has gone into eclipse so they must either repair or abandon the relationship. What gives the movie its intrigue and vitality though is the neighborhood where the story takes place. Minghella's real interest seems to lie in exploring an area of his hometown of London that teems with immigrants from everywhere.
Because King's Cross -- what Americans might call an "iffy" neighborhood -- is undergoing extensive urban renewal, young professionals rub shoulders with people who have recently fled from war or privation in their native lands. There is less animosity in Minghella's portrait of these collisions of class and ethnicity than may in fact be the case. He is determined that his characters will possess empathy, though, let's face it, some of that empathy stems from sexual attraction.
All of which means "Breaking" is a tough movie to market. The title makes it sound like a caper or crime film, and its themes can't easily be summed up in snappy ad copy. The film will need positive reviews and word-of-mouth to lead audiences to this often rewarding though occasionally pretentious story where a neighborhood is really the central character.
While this is an original screenplay, you might think it stems from a novel the way characters ruminate about life and speculate philosophically in the middle of scenes. In this manner, theft becomes a major metaphor. Will and Liv must wonder which larceny is the graver crime: Miro's theft of Will's possessions or Will's theft of his mother's heart.
The saving grace to all this moralizing and musing is that Minghella does not go for easy answers. Characters are caught in confusion because of conflicted feelings. Often they do the wrong thing. Minghella doesn't want to judge people. And his actors give him fine portraits in disorientation, of immigrants trying to get their bearings in a foreign land or professionals who feel perhaps guilty over invading the terrain of the new arrivals in the name of urban renewal.
You sense that Minghella is unable to make up his mind about the issues he raises and the behavior of his characters. "Breaking" not only has a sense of discovery of this cross-section of King's Cross but also a sense of disorder and randomness. Not every motive is pinned down; not every act has a motive.
Law makes a man who is at times a cad basically sympathetic. Binoche give the film's most touching performance as a woman who has not experienced physical love in a long while only to discover that it carries a steep price. Wright Penn makes Liv a woman who is ice but wants desperately to be heat. Gavron mirrors the dilemma of an immigrant youth torn between a Muslim and Christian heritage.
Obviously, Alex McDowell's production design and Benoit Delhomme's cinematography make major contributions in turning the ominous streets, row flats and enormous construction sites into a living, breathing character. The score, a mix of the group Underground and Gabriel Yared, supplies a poetic musical backdrop.
Breaking and Entering
By TODD MCCARTHY
Variety
The possible upsides of lying and being burglarized are among the numerous topics held up to the light for close examination in "Breaking and Entering." Anthony Minghella's film is conspicuously thoughtful and civilized as it provides a close-up snapshot of particular aspects of life in London at this moment. Entirely respectable in every way, it nonetheless has a very cool body temperature and thus likely will inspire polite admiration rather than excitement among viewers, which looks to limit how far it will go -- at least in North America -- to relatively upscale situations.
After big international productions "The English Patient," "The Talented Mr. Ripley" and "Cold Mountain," this is the first time Minghella has worked from his own original screenplay since his debut film, "Truly, Madly, Deeply." It's very much the picture of a writer taking stock of the society and city in which he lives, sorting things out in his own mind in a way that will prove intellectually engaging and meaningful for an audience.
The public that will respond to his musings is mostly the same one that reads books and attends serious theater, the gentrification class that is now gingerly moving into the film's very specific setting, the dicey but quickly changing King's Cross area in North London. King's Cross Station is known to the world as the embarkation point of Harry Potter's Hogwarts Express, but the real neighborhood surrounding it has long teemed with immigrants and criminals.
The face of King's Cross is now being altered by England's biggest urban renewal project, and characters very much like Will Francis (Jude Law) who, with partner Sandy (Martin Freeman), has opened a high-end landscape architecture office in the area. In short order, the building is broken into not once but twice and robbed of all its high-tech equipment. Laying in wait at night for the intruder to strike yet again, Will sees him and chases him far enough to know what flat he has run into.
Will is most annoyed at the fact that his "whole life" is on his stolen laptop. That life consists of a well-appointed but trying home life with girlfriend Liv (Robin Wright Penn), a Scandinavian woman with a 13-year-old daughter, Bea (Poppy Rogers), who doesn't eat or sleep and compulsively practices gymnastics day and night. This situation deeply concerns Liv, a depressive herself whose therapy sessions with Will cast light on the deficiencies in their relationship.
The gradually unfolding story has Will making the acquaintance of the young burglar's attractive mother, Amira (Juliette Binoche), a Bosnian refugee and tailor to whose flat he brings some clothes for repair. Will says nothing of the crimes, but verifies the guilt of Amira's son by finding his stuff in the kid's room. In turn, the 15-year-old son, Miro (Rafi Gavron), finds the business card Will has left at the flat and now knows the game is up.
With things slowly atrophying at home with Liv, Will draws closer to Amira and rashly instigates an affair, prompting unsettling feelings. Amira, who would like to return to Sarajevo where her husband died, is vulnerable on every level.
What happens thereon involves several curious turns of emotions and justice, of both the legal and ethical varieties, leading to an almost startlingly upbeat and resolved result for all concerned. As such, this is one of the optimistic contemporary dramas of recent times. Or perhaps it's just wishful thinking.
Pic is absorbing, but in a decidedly low-key way. Partly this stems from Law's character, who is polite and imperturbable to a fault. As he at one point remarks, "I tidy up," a phrase that could be applied to his function with his family, Amira and her son, his office and the neighborhood. But one seldom really knows what's going on inside him, which is a problem when he begins spending time with Amira. Law's reading of Will is credible but lacks force, which may or may not be intentional.
Even more inscrutable is Liv, who suffers from "Scandinavian spells." A frustrated Will asks her point-blank what she wants, and it's impossible to know the answer; as good an actress as she is, Wright Penn can't clarify it. A related problem is her daughter, whose condition is so weird one can't get a handle on what to make of it.
Binoche, physically unchanged as ever, plays Amira's controlled anguish with skill, and Gavron is a very good-looking kid with presence. Vera Farmiga has a high old time in her brief role as an Eastern European hooker who would like to make a client out of Will.
Benoit Delhomme's lensing has an understated elegance, and Lisa Gunning's supple editing and Gabriel Yared and Underworld's score is frequently working to achieve emotional turbulence and counterpoint.
----------------------------------------------------
Breaking and Entering
By Kirk Honeycutt
Hollywood Reporter
TORONTO -- "Breaking and Entering," the first movie Anthony Minghella has directed from a screenplay of his own since his impressive 1991 debut, "Truly Madly Deeply," relates a commonplace story about a couple whose love has gone into eclipse so they must either repair or abandon the relationship. What gives the movie its intrigue and vitality though is the neighborhood where the story takes place. Minghella's real interest seems to lie in exploring an area of his hometown of London that teems with immigrants from everywhere.
Because King's Cross -- what Americans might call an "iffy" neighborhood -- is undergoing extensive urban renewal, young professionals rub shoulders with people who have recently fled from war or privation in their native lands. There is less animosity in Minghella's portrait of these collisions of class and ethnicity than may in fact be the case. He is determined that his characters will possess empathy, though, let's face it, some of that empathy stems from sexual attraction.
All of which means "Breaking" is a tough movie to market. The title makes it sound like a caper or crime film, and its themes can't easily be summed up in snappy ad copy. The film will need positive reviews and word-of-mouth to lead audiences to this often rewarding though occasionally pretentious story where a neighborhood is really the central character.
While this is an original screenplay, you might think it stems from a novel the way characters ruminate about life and speculate philosophically in the middle of scenes. In this manner, theft becomes a major metaphor. Will and Liv must wonder which larceny is the graver crime: Miro's theft of Will's possessions or Will's theft of his mother's heart.
The saving grace to all this moralizing and musing is that Minghella does not go for easy answers. Characters are caught in confusion because of conflicted feelings. Often they do the wrong thing. Minghella doesn't want to judge people. And his actors give him fine portraits in disorientation, of immigrants trying to get their bearings in a foreign land or professionals who feel perhaps guilty over invading the terrain of the new arrivals in the name of urban renewal.
You sense that Minghella is unable to make up his mind about the issues he raises and the behavior of his characters. "Breaking" not only has a sense of discovery of this cross-section of King's Cross but also a sense of disorder and randomness. Not every motive is pinned down; not every act has a motive.
Law makes a man who is at times a cad basically sympathetic. Binoche give the film's most touching performance as a woman who has not experienced physical love in a long while only to discover that it carries a steep price. Wright Penn makes Liv a woman who is ice but wants desperately to be heat. Gavron mirrors the dilemma of an immigrant youth torn between a Muslim and Christian heritage.
Obviously, Alex McDowell's production design and Benoit Delhomme's cinematography make major contributions in turning the ominous streets, row flats and enormous construction sites into a living, breathing character. The score, a mix of the group Underground and Gabriel Yared, supplies a poetic musical backdrop.
"What the hell?"
Win Butler
Win Butler