London in Film

Breaking and Entering (2006)

Once again the director of cinematic epics like The English Patient and Cold Mountain has created a piece of cinema that is as meticulously detailed as it is grand and sweeping. In Breaking and Entering, Anthony Minghella has fused the minute, detailed and complicated nuances of his characters with the strikingly brash, gritty and uncompromising city that is London.

Our protagonist, Will, played by long time Minghella collaborator Jude Law, is a married architect who is left frustrated by a spate of robberies at his firms HQ in London's notorious Kings Cross region. One night, after another break-in, Will follows the young man behind the crime and eventually discovers that his mother is a wonderfully charming and honest Bosnian refugee by the name of Amira. His obsession to solve the mystery of the robberies, quickly turns into an obsession with Amira and an unlikely bond ensues.

Like his multiple Oscar winning The English Patient, Minghella's characters are sensitively considered and carefully constructed (the director has no wish to depict graphic sexual encounters, he is seemingly as adverse to this as filming an action sequence). Our protagonists are lent an air of grandeur through the canvas of an ever changing London; this is no mistake, the city pervades their lives in just the way a true Londoner would expect it to. The council estates of Kings Cross (actually Swiss Cottage) act as Minghella's current Sahara desert; the setting contextualises all that we see, and the story unravels from within it.

Add to this an array of wonderfully talented actors; Jude Law, Juliette Binoche, Ray Winstone and a breakthrough role for Rafi Gavron. However, as many a critic pointed out, the show is well and truly stolen by Vera Farmiga playing an almost impossibly loquacious prostitute. The first hour of the piece is without doubt the most well thought out, well paced and well delivered of any film I have seen this year year, and then, well, the tone kind of changes. This is when you are reminded that you are watching Minghellas film; he is telling the story, however effortlessly it seemed to unfold.

To say that things change is not meant as a criticism of a truly gifted storyteller (pun intended), yet one who is not unfamiliar with a degree of criticism (the casting of Matt Damon in Ripley for example) directed at his post English Patient cinema. I understand that the films idealistic conclusion did not please all, but this was a man who joked that the final scene of Cold Mountain was a silent plea to the UN, and I bet it was. The Minghella and Jude Law partnership should be the reason you love this film, but if you cant overlook the formers idealism, and the latters fame (I'm referring to a scene on top of Primrose Hill), then perhaps this isn't the one for you.