Movie Review — Breaking and Entering (2006)
A tight drama where all main characters face their own truths
A fascinating movie, written with great empathy around an intelligent concept, and acted like a dream. The Oscar-winner Anthony Minghella (The English Patient, 1996) again excels both as a director and a writer.
A double break-in into the offices of a London architectural firm co-owned by Will Francis (a liquid-vulnerable Jude Law) leads to a similar breakdown in Will’s family life.
Feeling alienated from the “circle” of his live-in partner Liv (the ethereal Robin Wright Penn) and her hyperactive autistic daughter Bea (Poppy Rogers), Will finds solace in his large-scale construction project at King’s Cross, a rather mixed lower-class neighborhood with a heavy concentration of immigrants.
Amira (Juliette Binoche of Bleu (1993), an irresistible talent with a perpetual girlish charm) is one such immigrant from Bosnia who took refuge in Britain with her 15-year old athletic son Miro (Rafi Gavron), the same kid who broke twice into Will’s studio to steal his computers on behalf of his Serbian gang-leader uncle.
When Will follows Miro one night back to Amira’s humble two-room apartment, he realizes that the thief’s mother is the same woman that he accidentally met earlier…
