Breaking and Entering (film)

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Breaking and Entering

Breaking and Entering Original Film Poster
Directed by Anthony Minghella
Produced by Timothy Bricknell
Anthony Minghella
Sydney Pollack
Written by Anthony Minghella
Starring Jude Law
Juliette Binoche
Robin Wright Penn
Music by Gabriel Yared
Underworld
Cinematography Benoît Delhomme
Editing by Lisa Gunning
Distributed by - USA -
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM) /The Weinstein Company
- non-USA -
Miramax Films
Release date(s) December 15, 2006
Running time 116 minutes
Country Flag of the United Kingdom UK
Flag of the United States USA
Language English
Preceded by Cold Mountain (2003)
Official website
Allmovie profile
IMDb profile

Breaking and Entering, is a 2006 romantic drama film, was Academy Award-winning director Anthony Minghella's first original screenplay since his 1991 feature debut, Truly, Madly, Deeply.

The film stars Jude Law – whom Minghella directed in Cold Mountain and The Talented Mr. Ripley – and Juliette Binoche, from The English Patient, also directed by Anthony Minghella, and Chocolat.

In a major supporting role, Robin Wright Penn plays Liv, the long-standing girlfriend of Will (Jude Law's character).

Rafi Gavron, in his first major film role, portrays Miro. The role, that of a young traceur, and the burglar to which the film's title partly alludes, requires Gavron to perform several difficult physical feats.

The film, shot and set in King's Cross, a blighted, inner-city neighbourhood of London, examines an affair which unfolds between a successful British landscape architect and Amira, a Bosnian woman – the mother of a troubled teen son – who was widowed by the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina. The filming location for Amira's flat is Rowley Way, South Hampstead, London; other locations are the Primrose Hill, Camden Lock Market and Alexandra Palace, Muswell Hill.

It is a presentation of Miramax Films and The Weinstein Company and was distributed in the U.S. by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM).
Breaking and Entering premièred on September 13, 2006 at the Toronto International Film Festival.[1]

Contents

[edit] Plot

Will Francis (Jude Law), a young Englishman, is a landscape architect living a detached, routine-based life with his Swedish-American girlfriend Liv (Robin Wright Penn) and her behaviourally challenged daughter Bea in London. The 13-year-old girl's irregular sleeping and eating habits as well as her unsocial behaviour (she has trouble relating to people and seems only interested in doing somersaults and practising her gymnastics) reach worrying proportions and start to put a lot of strain on Will and Liv's relationship. Complicating the situation further is his feeling of being shut out of their inner circle since Bea is not his biological daughter. He and Liv start relationship counselling, but their drifting apart continues.

Simultaneously on the business front, Will's and his partner Sandy's state-of-the-art offices in the Kings Cross area are repeatedly burgled by a group of Slavic language speaking thieves. They employ a 15-year-old traceur named Miro (Rafi Gavron) whose acrobatic skills allow them to enter the building. Miro is actually a refugee from Bosnia living with his Muslim mother Amira (Juliette Binoche) who works as a seamstress while his Serbian father was murdered during the war.

Though they're puzzled about the burglars' ability to disable the alarm, the two architects are not particularly worried after the first break-in, mostly writing it off to the neighbourhood's dodgy reputation. However, after the second one they decide to stake out the building after hours hoping to find the culprit and alert the police. Being out of the house on nightly stakeouts actually suits Will just fine, allowing him to get away from the cold atmosphere of his household. He even strikes up a strange acquaintance with an Eastern European prostitute named Ouna (Vera Farmiga) who hangs around the area every night. Spotting Miro attempting to break in one night, Will attempts to follow him. This pursuit leads Will to the flat where Miro lives with his mother Amira. Realizing their modest living means he decides not to report his findings to the police, but goes back to Amira's apartment under the guise of having a suit that needs mending.

He soon becomes emotionally entangled with her, causing him to re-evaluate his life. Conflict arises when the police close in on the burglars, and Will must make a crucial choice which will affect the lives of everyone around him.

[edit] Cast

[edit] Primary cast

[edit] Supporting Cast

[edit] Soundtrack

Main article: Breaking and Entering (soundtrack)
Jude Law and Juliette Binoche experience an avalanche of conflicting emotion in "Breaking and Entering."
Jude Law and Juliette Binoche experience an avalanche of conflicting emotion in "Breaking and Entering."

Gabriel Yared and Underworld collaborated on the film's original music score.

[edit] Trivia

  • The techniques used to burgle Green Effect come from parkour, a physical discipline and recreational activity of French origin whose practitioners are called traceurs. Sometimes confused with free running, a related discipline derived from parkour, the art, as it is called by some practitioners, has gained in popularity in urban areas, particularly in Europe, during the early 21st century.

[edit] References

  1. ^ 2006 Toronto International Film Festival.

[edit] External links