Breaking and Entering
Directed by: Anthony Minghella
Starring: Jude Law, Juliette Binoche, Robin Wright-Penn, Vera Farmiga

Breaking and Entering is the first time Anthony Minghella has worked from his own script since his feature debut Truly, Madly, Deeply, and he seems more involved with his material than ever before. Gone is the bombast of The English Patient, The Talented Mister Ripley, Cold Mountain, his trio of award-winning juggernauts directed for Miramax. Minghella returns to a sort of smaller-scale filmmaking that is more specific and more engrossing at the same time. Yes, its cool knowing elegance provokes a reserved meditation rather than righteous angst and the viewers are likely to admire it quietly rather than cheer it loudly, but this is still intelligent and thought-provoking cinema at its best.

Minghella works with a setting he lives in and loves, and takes us right to the frontline of class confrontation of today’s London. This King’s Cross Station is not the enchanted starting point of Harry Potter’s railway journey, but a place with the dicey reputation in North London now probed by well-meaning missionary-like middle class businesses. In the film, one Will Francis (Jude Law) is at the spearhead of this attempt of civilised intervention. He and his partner Sandy (Martin Freeman) open a high-end architecture office in the area, but it is summarily robbed and relieved of all kinds of expensive equipment, including Will’s laptop, which, in his words, contains “his whole life”. Apart from his work, this life consists of a relationship with the Swede Liv (Robin Wright Penn), which is slowly but surely eroded by the neurosis and cognitive disorders of Liv’s 13-year-old daughter and Liv’s own persistent depression.

Will’s office is robbed again, but he manages to identify the teenage culprit (Rafi Gavron) who is a refugee from Bosnia and follows him back to his home. Rather than tell the police, he opts for a sort of analytical civilised justice of his own and befriends the boy’s mother Amira (Juliette Binoche) under false pretexts. With his life at home piling up problems on top of his professional tight spots, Will initiates an affair with Amira, before anyone can consider the consequences.

Events unfold in an unexpected yet logical pattern, which, despite a somewhat implausible upbeat resolution, do not smell of contrivance. Minghella does weave an ample amount of his own observations of class, cultural and ethnic conflict into the proceedings and his story rearranges the details into the noble, if unlikely, solution he envisions. Minghella has been accused that it is easy being romantically civilised and preaching peace and understanding from a privileged position, but there is nothing wrong with being optimistic, me says. The cast seem to conform to the latter as they give committed performances that make the best of the script, which is at times demanding a lot with somewhat theatrical constructions: “I love your laugh. I’d love to gather up your laughs, and lock them in a box like bees, and nobody would be allowed the key,” says Will at one point. Oddly, phrasing of this order does not seem necessarily out of place in this very absorbing film, which engulfs you with its elegance. It prefers articulate persuasion to loud rhetoric and this produces a small cinematic miracle.