uHollywood

BROKEN PROMISES!

BREAKING AND ENTERING

(16, general release)

*

Having directed Cold Mountain & The English Patient, Anthony Minghella returns with the lifeless and drab Breaking and Entering a romantic drama which also touches on the tentative issues of immigration & multi-culturism, poverty & urban renewal, race, class & contemporary relationships. Wow, that was a mouthful! Unfortunately in the process of trying to deal with so many different themes along with its pallid look and humorless manner, it starts to crack under the weight.

Will Francis (Jude Law) is a successful architect hired to redevelop the crumbling King’s Cross district, a junction between the new London and the migrant communities that flock to its cheap streets. However a delivery of new computersis stolen from his office by a gang of very nimble Bosnian burglars. What does he do? He stakes out the building, catching Miro (newcomer Rafi Gavron) in the act and follows him directly to his home where he lives with his mother, Amira (Juliette Binoche).

So he persecutes them; receives back his property and lives happily ever after. Wrong! He instead reaches out to the refugees, eventually starting an affair with Amira, just as his own relationship with his partner Liv (Robin Wright Penn) is falling apart, some of which is due to challenges with her autistic teenage daughter Bea (Poppy Rogers).

Jude Law (Cold Mountain) unfortunately underperforms again with what I would describe as a wooden presentation of an already tedious & unlikable character in Will: a financially successful & secure man infused with a selfish attitude and apathy towards everybody around him including his own family matched by a monotonous performance from Wright-Penn (Unbreakable) who seemed very quick to forgive and forget!

Some of the more engaging performances when they do arrive come from Martin Freeman as Law’s self-effacing business partner Sandy with a touching attraction towards one of the cleaners and Ray Winstone as Bruno, a streetwise detective but sadly these appearances are few and far between! Likewise, Vera Farmiga (from The Departed) playing a Russian prostitute provides a very realistic & human portrayal before she just disappears from the story.

Alas the rest of the film is full of contrived; forced emotions and all too obvious coincidences. Though there is one brilliant scene that shines out amidst the fog and reveals a dark; seedy side of Binoche’s character in the process revealing her survival skills. While her actions should have set the scene for a tense ending, it got lost in a artificial sea of sentiment and moral goodness which wasabsolutelyout of place considering the empty, cruel characters involved. It doesn’t deserve a happy ending!

Breaking and Entering is full of broken promises; restricted; dreary characters and unrealized potential which is why I doubt it’ll break any box office records or enter any-body’s heart!