Will (Jude Law) contemplates his life in the Anthony Minghella film Breaking and Entering. (Alliance Atlantis)
When Will (Jude Law), a yuppie landscape architect topped with hair wax and bottomed with expensive trainers, sets up shop in a massive warehouse in the middle of the rough King’s Cross neighborhood, he is making a statement about urban life: London is a great merging of cultures and classes — or at least it damn well should be. Will is ready to buy the fantasy, and package and sell it, for a lot of money. But only days after fresh iBooks and digital TVs are delivered to his office, the place is ransacked — twice.
The sound of ideals — political and personal — slowly deflating hisses throughout Breaking and Entering. Beautiful, impoverished Bosnian war refugee Amira (Juliette Binoche) is anxious to save her son (Rafi Gavron) from the street-thug future he’s barreling toward. Meanwhile, Will’s long-term girlfriend, Liv (Robin Wright Penn), is turning her vaguely autistic daughter into her life’s work, leaving her romance, and her mind, in ruins.
Director Anthony Minghella (The English Patient, Cold Mountain) likes his films packed with actors; watch for Vera Farmiga and Ray Winstone entering, making Law look dull, then leaving. Minghella teases out fantastic performances from Penn, who radiates the isolation of a true depressive, and Binoche, who offers brief but wonderful glints that in her life before the war, she was an easy laugher, a woman with a light heart.
The collision of such disparate and desperate people only happens in the movies, and Minghella’s gift/handicap is that his films always feel like films — too clever, too clean, too chiseled to have much to do with the real world. Still, there is something about the breakdown of a lived-in relationship like Will and Liv’s that matters. It is in those unnoted moments of distance between old lovers that Minghella comes close to showing the real crimes of the heart.
Breaking and Entering screens at TIFF on Sept. 13 and 14.
Katrina Onstad writes about the arts for CBC.ca.
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