Whenever a city needs to sell a big urban-redevelopment project to the public, it trots out those architect’s renderings: gleaming stadiums, futuristic bus stations, and manicured pedestrian walkways. A shimmering future where all the decorative trees are perfectly trimmed — all just one bond issue away. And don’t we always fall for it?
In Breaking and Entering, director (and in this rare case, writer too) Anthony Minghella weaves a smart study of broken relationships with the metaphor of a major urban renewal project. It’s a preternaturally apt combination: Breaking and Entering falters for the same reason as so many of these starry redevelopment plans.
Will Francis (Jude Law) is Minghella’s favorite type of character: a man running from his own life. “When you stop looking at each other, shouldn’t that be a sign?” Will, a Bobo British architect, asks of his relationship with statuesque live-in girlfriend Liv (Robin Wright Penn).
His work is his refuge: he’s just moved his up-and-coming firm to a rehabbed warehouse in London’s dodgy King’s Cross section, and has a big public contract to rebuild the neighborhood into something more Starbucks friendly. The plan, glimpsed in passing shots of elaborate scale models, is daring — lots of steps, terraces and canals — and packed with Will’s soaring ideas about space and society. But the project gets more complicated when thieves break in and steal all the firm’s computers.
Law’s portrayal of Will is distant and imponderable. The seedy streets of King’s Cross that surround him are far more vivid. The camera spends long, enjoyable moments on place: roofs of alien-looking housing projects, smoky bingo halls filled with hijab-clad gamblers, and dark, Dickensian alleys. Cut with a cool, ambient score and shot with an understated perceptiveness, it’s London in the here-and-now — real and exciting.
King’s Cross yields up Miro (Rafi Gavron), a Bosnian-immigrant teen who spends his days “free running” (a teen pseudo-sport that involves jumping, flipping, and climbing over urban architecture: like performing skateboarding tricks without a skateboard) and his nights breaking into Will’s office. Will catches on, and motivated by, well…something that isn’t the expected vengefulness, goes to confront Miro’s widowed mother Amira (Juliette Binoche.)
The tale accelerates slowly, partially because Minghella seems much less interested in his potential-filled characters than in the ideas they represent. A little class-clash commentary is thrown in, but his real ideas are much larger and much more nebulous. And to get them across he deploys a clutter of symbols, parallels, and leitmotifs that function, most clearly, as cinematic speed bumps. There are knotted-up themes of theft, redemption, and parental responsibility; an agility-versus-rigidity / youth-versus-age double dichotomy, and popping in sporadically, an entirely symbolic fox.
A little farther along in exasperation, Will proclaims, “I don’t even know how to be honest…that’s why I like metaphors,” and it rings a little too true.
When, instead of asking her for the laptop her son stole, Will seduces Amira, it’s hard to tell whether he’s acting out his own opaque desires to escape bourgeois boredom or Minghella’s equally opaque symbolism.
Their first liaison — a tepid, awkwardly-long scene ordered by the unglamorous logistics of finding a friend with an empty apartment — seems to flash the film’s knack for atmospherics. But all this smartness is out-smarting the viewer: Is the sterility of this scene supposed to be profound, or dull — or dully profound? Or, is it just mediocre acting? Wait, what symbols am I supposed to be watching for? Shoot, it’s over.
The supporting roles are purely allegorical. The firm’s cleaning lady reads Kafka. The weathered detective investigating the break-in laments the injustice of sending burglars to jail. A prostitute Will befriends deals in deft psychoanalysis, and does something inanely out-of-character to his car. The only plausible personality is Sandy (Martin Freeman), Will’s scruffy business partner, who wants nothing more complicated than to get a date and see the cops catch the bad guys.
Things turn dark and callous when the truth about Miro gets between Will and Amira, each suddenly maneuvering to protect the things that, they now realize, they love far more than each other. This could be an interesting place to start a movie. But now it’s time to for the film to suggest an answer to its question. (Can we renew our run-down relationships like we rehab our run-down neighborhoods?) And for all its cerebral prognosticating, what it finally offers is surprisingly slapped-together.
Take a second look at those architect’s drawings. You’re supposed to be looking at the stately plazas and bold, Jetson-y porticos — but what about people these buildings are for? Invariably, if they’re pictured at all, they’re ant-like dots crawling on pristine sidewalks, or they’re blank figures: decorative embellishments, like the sidewalk planters.
So it is with Breaking and Entering, which sketches an original, ornate work rich with ideas and meanings. But the people that are supposed to inhabit it are secondary. Characters who, if they were understood clearly in the first place, are bent and shaped improbably to fit a series of propositions.
When architects prioritize their work’s aesthetic meanings over its simple human function, society ends up with hugely expensive stadiums that host tiny crowds and pedestrian promenades where no one wants to walk. When Minghella, whose directing skills here top his writing, makes the same mistake, we get something that’s interesting to look at but, in the end, is just another white elephant.
– Louis Wittig is a writer in New York.