Cool and elegant, but with no heart to break

FIRST NIGHT
Breaking and Entering

Toronto Film Festival

Breaking And Entering, director Anthony Minghella's first film since 2003's epic Cold Mountain sees him working on a smaller, more intimate scale, while at the same time venturing into the fashionable world of stories about characters whose lives collide as a result of an apparently random act.

Here, the incident that sets everything in motion is the break-in of the title. The film, which has echoes of both Closer and 21 Grams, is a coolly elegant, rather-too-clever examination of different aspects of contemporary London that never really becomes g reater than the sum of its parts.

More seriously, we soon stop believing the characters' choices are motivated by anything other than the scheme of the screenplay (written by Minghella himself-naturally). Jude Law does his best to hold it all together with a powerfully understated performance as Will, an architect who believes that the King's Cross area is quintessentially urban and should be developed that way, not turned into some oasis of green in the city.

Just how urban it really is he soon discovers, when a Serbianrun gang using freestyling roofjumpers breaks into Will's new office and steals a van-full of computer equipment. One of the gang, Miro (Rafi Gavron, excellent in his film debut), ends up with Will's laptop and, on a whim, returns his personal photos. This starts a process that results in Will having an affair with Miro's Bosnian mother, Amira ( Juliette Binoche), provoking crises on a whole series of levels that are resolved in a desperately unconvincing scene with the police, headed by an unusually benevolent Ray Winstone.

It is a film of contrasts - Binoche's down-to-earth and passionate Amira versus Will's wife, Liv (Robin Wright Penn), a coolly beautiful but withdrawn Swedish blonde; the elegance of Will's vision of King's Cross versus the untidy, violent reality with its gangs, prostitutes and urban foxes. There are also a series of word-plays, sometimes verbal - "Breaking isn't always bad," muses Will. "I mean, we break habits" - sometimes visual.

The film is likewise started by a break-in and ended by two breaks: a fracture suffered by Liv's daughter and the break Will gives Miro. As for entering, a fair amount of that goes on between Binoche and Law, but little contact is made. As this may suggest, it is a very clever script - too clever, in fact, giving the impression of having been polished and finetuned to the point where the life goes out of it and the characters are moved around like the tiny figures on one of Will's models.

Indeed, much as with Will's vision for King's Cross, Breaking And Entering is a beautifully shaped, elegantly constructed artefact with a hole right where its heart ought to be.

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