Ray Pride

I bet David Fincher has a nice house.

The satiric bent of the furnishings of his sets, such as in "Fight Club" (1999) and "The Panic Room" (2002), suggests a more-than-glancing familiarity with the trappings of luxe, the display of surplus value that can be more than an assertion of the presence of capital. Other directors seem not to have a clue; cf. Chris Columbus, with shelter-porn pop-up books like "Stepmom." Television's done well by thirtysomething characters and those in their forties (see: "thirtysomething") who express themselves by the space they occupy and how they furnish their self-image.

When word came of "Breaking and Entering," playwright-screenwriter-musician-director Anthony Minghella's first original screenplay since 1991's "Truly Madly Deeply," set in a gentrifying neighborhood like the now-turned Notting Hill, where writer-producer Richard Curtis' less-than-hyper-critical mash notes to real estate also unfold, it seemed like he might have the grasp, the ambition, to capture that, something plausible, comestible, domesticated, not the toilet-read tour of the Ikea catalog in "Fight Club," but world and money in conflict, an ironic Pottery Barn or Terence Conran tour. (I'm sure Minghella's houses are nice, too.)

Will (ever-puppyish Jude Law) is partnered in a landscape architecture firm, which keeps him from his girlfriend Liv (Robin Wright Penn) and her young daughter. Having recently moved to King's Cross, London's prime urban-renewal neighborhood, Will's office is broken into repeatedly, and his life crosses with a teenage troublemaker, Miro (Rafi Gavron), who he follows back to his apartment, where he encounters Miro's mother, (Juliette Binoche), a Bosnian refugee. Cross-cultural cross-sections ensue. Minghella has ambition, but the strands don't fully mesh (although it is impressive that his studio in North London was burglarized thirteen times in eight weeks). In the film's press kit, Minghella notes the landscape of "Kosovans, Slovenians, Bosnians, Brazilians, Mexicans, Nigerians, Ghanaians." He further writes, "They're largely invisible to the welfare state, they're invisible culturally, but they make up the high percentage of this great city. And I thought, if you make a movie about London, you'd better make a movie which at least looks at that issue, looks at the degree of privilege and the degree of under-privilege that obtain right now in London. I wanted to make a film that somehow glanced at this without making anybody feel that they were just being told off."

Leave aside momentarily the couture affect of some of Minghella's most delirious (even delicious) pictorial moments in "The English Patient" or "The Talented Mr. Ripley" or "Cold Mountain" where, to many viewers, the morality is dicey at best. Consider this extended rant from his short play, "Cigarettes and Chocolate," which demonstrates a familiarity with occupied (and preoccupied) space: "There's only one Porsche in the entire building, it's a left-hand drive, it's an old left-hand drive Porsche, it's actually rather beautiful. Of course it's revolting, it's full of revolting people... my point is, about the flat, my flat, is that... instead of being careful, the psychopath has lost all self-control and has abandoned the black bag regime... You know they won't take the rubbish unless it's in black bags? Well that's all out the window... the guy clearly is the Take Away King of North London, when they catch him there will be serious economic problems in the Indian Restaurant trade.... Each time I get home, I want to wade in to his little plastic bags and discover his name... I know somewhere... between the Chicken Tikka Masala and the, I'm sure there's abandoned pornography as well... there will be his name, he will have left his name somewhere on an envelope... I intend to scoop up an armful of this crap... and ring his bell and dump it over his mentally deranged psychopathic little head." Minghella's "Mr. Wonderful" wasn't, but still there seemed such poetic potential, a lyrical yet bated whisper of the dream-tossed sleep of the privileged who remember other times, classes, impulse, a tour inside a moneyed mind, but one that remembers ramen and writing on the back of manuscript pages with a scratchy biro. (What a lot of want to put on this striving tale!)

I quote at length from "C&C," as "Breaking and Entering," despite being located in the midst of what Minghella has called "an architectural convulsion," does not comprise a satisfying cinematic one. A soothing melancholy is suggested (and perhaps most adroitly evoked in the melting blurs of out-of-focus crowds under the end credits). Handsome people suffer in cinematographer Benoit Delhomme's reflected light, scored limpidly, attractively, by Gabriel Yared and Underworld. Narrative symmetries reassure. A romantic intelligence suffuses Minghella's most offhand gestures. Binoche softly carries the weight of the world amid the creases on her face. The ingredients do not metabolize. Michael Haneke's film "Hidden" is a far crueler stew of these ingredients, and more successful for it: it's the difference between burlap and cashmere.

"Breaking and Entering" opens Friday.

(2007-02-06)

Also by Ray Pride

Truth to Power
Festival programmers claimed in advance they'd been more adventurous, more political in their choices than ever and, ironically, 2007 boasted more sales of more diverse movies than any in memory. Guiding light Robert Redford had other things on his mind in opening remarks, when he dismissed the idea that the festival had become merely a market: "There's been buzz about stuff that's tanked." More notably, he positioned himself as "left-handed"
(2007-01-30)

Tip of the Week
A substantive batch of shorts produced in 2006 and presented by Chicago Filmmakers as "Redefining Video," the work of 17-year-old Michigander Kyle Canterbury has hypnotic moments, working with simple abstractions of concrete things, for the most part, almost all rephotographed off of a video monitor to take advantage of the form's still-evolving potential for capturing texture
(2007-01-30)

Mister Dominick, tear down this wall!
The intermittent groaning and bleeping along the half city block of mud and dirt on Chicago Avenue from first light to dusk is no mystery--but the view is gone. The spread of land where the Edmar supermarket stood until summer is now hidden from eastern eyes: a greater-than-story-high pale retaining wall, drab, Soviet, up against the McDonald's on the corner, a gray cement barricade, like a barrier against slurry in mining operations
(2007-01-23)

What Goes Unsaid
So I'm telling a friend about "Catch and Release," the bittersweet romantic comedy that's "Erin Brockovich" screenwriter Susannah Grant's debut as a director. She stops me: "Romantic comedy. Jennifer Garner. You liked it. But is it any good?" (A swift punch to a soft spot.) Why do people want to hate romantic comedies?
(2007-01-23)

Tip of the Week
(2007-01-23)

Iraq 'n' Roll
(2007-01-16)

Tip of the Week
(2007-01-16)

Teenage Wasteland
(2007-01-09)

Tip of the Week
(2007-01-09)

Tip of the Week
(2007-01-02)

Potter's Field
(2007-01-02)

What Screams May Come
(2006-12-22)

about Newcitychicago | about Newcity magazine | advertising | privacy policy | FAQ | employment