Breaking and Entering

Directed by Anthony Minghella

Contemporary angst has rarely been as aesthetically pleasing as it is in Anthony Minghella’s Breaking and Entering, where a couple’s marital misery is introduced through the windshield of a gleaming Range Rover. There are high tech gadgets galore, hip fashion and haircuts for its pretty stars, a posh London townhouse shared by the unhappy couple Will (Jude Law) and Liv (Robin Wright Penn) and other markers of upwardly mobile angst.

Many may find themselves perplexed at how people in possession of such sweet real estate can complain so much in this scrambled romantic melodrama with a veneer of sociopolitical importance.

Will is a visionary architect with a dream of turning the urban blighted North London neighborhood of King’s Cross into an architectural futurescape. Toward that end, Will and sidekick lawyer pal Sandy (Martin Freeman) set up shop in the dodgy hood. But their desire to architecturally uplift the masses is confounded by the persistence of the local hoodlum class to burgle them blind.

A desire to find the criminal culprits may be Will’s displaced desire to engage with a reality outside his stultifying Crate and Barrel theater of pain. The misguided do-goodism of naive lefties is an idea worth pursuing—but one which Minghella seems reluctant to dissect with any consistency.

Will escapes his domestic woes with Bergman-gloomy Swedish-American Liv and her autistic daughter in nightly surveillance missions spent waiting for the hoodlums to return to the scene of the crime. His stakeout leads him to the front door of beautiful Bosnian refugee Amira (Juliette Binoche), who’s the hot to Liv’s cold. Amira is also the mother of a teenager, Miro (Rafi Gavron), who’s fallen under the spell of the gang of thieves robbing Will’s office.

Anyone who can’t smell an impending emotional collision of the upper and lower classes has clearly not been keeping up with the cinema of contemporary estrangement practiced in films from Closer to Crash to Babel.

Like those films, Breaking and Entering is often better at mimicking the sensations of estrangement than the substance behind it. To his credit, Minghella certainly depicts the fraught urban landscape with a richly compelling finesse enhanced by Benoît Delhomme’s exquisitely frigid, silvery cinematography. With a nod to Clockwork Orange’s future-today, Minghella’s crooks practice the street acrobatics of parkour, and Amira and Miro live in a dystopian public housing block (Neave Brown’s Alexandra Road development), another era’s attempt at urban renewal.

But it’s hard to find a strain of coherence in the muddle: Can architecture really save the under classes or is cyborg beauty Will just kidding himself? Is parkour a more legitimate response to the despair of the urban landscape than well-meaning architects in Nehru collars?

The riddle of Breaking and Entering is the sphinx that befuddles and damns so many others in the cinema of modern ennui. Why when we all know the fretful, anxiety-inducing state of post millennial life so well, is it such a bitch to render on-screen without descending into the whininess of the privileged class measuring their own petty misery against ethnic cleansing and urban poverty?

Minghella’s Michael Haneke-lite tries for a comprehensive vision of global distress by populating his world with jaded immigrant hookers, glum working-class detectives and Eastern European crime syndicates. But a less exotic brand of relationship navel-gazing and emotionally diarrhetic melodrama are more the order of the day.

The cringe-inducing pronouncement, “I’ve been looking for love ... down there,” from slumming golden boy Will speaks volumes about the film’s true agenda of connecting to the Other via sex. Instead of recognizing the tragic interconnection of the world, Breaking and Entering suggests that the lower castes just need a pat on the head every now and then—a bit o’ charity so that the status quo can stay on track and the white collars can get back to building a better future.