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Breaking and EnteringReturning to contemporary London for the first time since his 1991 debut feature Truly, Madly, Deeply, Oscar-winning director Anthony Minghella presents an intelligent, engrossing, somewhat cerebral exploration of modern lives in crisis. Jude Law plays Will, a successful yuppie architect with a beautiful Swedish girlfriend (Wright Penn) who comes to question his philanthropic decision to relocate to rundown King's Cross when local tearaway Miro (Gavron) breaks into his swanky offices and nabs his cherished laptop. Rather than shopping the lad to the rozzers, Will embarks on an affair with his Bosnian refugee mother (Binoche), thus setting himself up for blackmail, exposure and heartbreak.
It sounds like a heady brew, and well it might have been had Minghella played it straight. Instead he pitches it as a sophisticated urban satire, Will's quest to retrieve his hardware propelling him into a squalid - through conspicuously unthreatening - underworld populated by Russian prostitutes, Eastern European gangs and immigrant families ripped apart by tragedy.
Not that his own life is entirely peachy: Wright Penn has an autistic daughter she dotes upon, making Jude feel like an unwanted stranger in his own house. It's this, as much as his reckless craving for adventure, that pushes him into another woman's arms - though how long will their romance last once she finds out what her son's been up to with his free-running pals?
With Binoche in terrific form as the fiercely protective mum trying to rebuild her shattered life, there is no shortage of dramatic confrontation. And her strong performance is mirrored by those of fellow Minghella alumni (Stevenson, Winstone) who populate the fringes of the story with rich, layered turns.
With its slightly distracting focus on London's cultural hodgepodge and ever-mutating landscape, though, Breaking And Entering is troublingly reminiscent of one of Stephen Poliakoff's coolly intellectual studies of the capital, and has a similar lack of emotional engagement. Part of this, alas, can be attributed to pretty-boy Law, whose superficial and self-absorbed musings fail to engage on even the most basic of levels.
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