Breaking and Entering (2006)

The Worst Film Ever

hyped garbage

This is one of the few movies I've ever seen where the whole audience broke into spontaneous, loud applause a third of the way in.

The story, direction, characters, and writing/dialogue is akin to taking a tranquilizer shot to the neck, but everything else was so well done.

Will Francis (Jude Law) opens a new architecture office in the transitioning London neighborhood Kings Cross. He and his girlfriend Liv (Robin Wright Penn) are growing distant and her autistic daughter Bea is one of the reasons. Meanwhile Amira (Juliette Binoche) is worried about her son Miro (Rafi Gavron) slipping into criminal activity. They're from Bosnia and his father was killed during the war. Miro is teamed up with his cousin Zoran (Ed Westwick) in the family crime business. They break into Will's office to steal computers. Miro steals the valuable miniatures for his own artistic work and is given Will's personal computer as a reward. They rob the place a second time and Will's partner Sandy (Martin Freeman) almost runs into them. Detective Bruno Fella (Ray Winstone) investigates. Will and Sandy decide to stake out their own offices and encounter prostitute Oana (Vera Farmiga) working in the area. One night, Will catches Miro and follows him all the way home. Instead of directing the cops to the thieve, he starts a relationship with his mother.This is written and directed by Anthony Minghella. I have no specific problems with the directions. It is all about the writing. It is overloaded with class warfare melodrama. Everybody has their own dramas. There is just too much. That's not to say there is nothing worthwhile. Binoche is amazing in this. If this is a simple movie about her and her son, this could be an award worthy performance. Again there are so many characters who each have their own drama. Minghella could easily cut out Sandy and Oana. Quite frankly, I couldn't care less about Will and his family drama either. The complicated melodrama is simply too complicated.

Anthony Minghella's 'Breaking and Entering' tells the story of the lives and loves of a group of north Londoners; but I found it an underwhelming affair. Neither Jude Law's flat male lead, nor Robin Wright-Penn's neurotic female one, attracted my sympathy; and the film as a whole had a soft-focus, idealised feel to it, with heavy use of an emotional soundtrack to underscore dialogue that doesn't always justify the treatment, and a story of a love triangle which magically ends with everyone getting what they really want. A certain housing estate in north London features as a backdrop, one you may have seen before in other films: is it really the only architecturally interesting estate in the city? But this is not such an interesting film.

Though I would rate it six out of ten, still it is one of the movies I got fully engrossed in, while watching it alone in a theater and couldn't stop myself writing a good review. It had few moments of emotional intimacy, likely to be impossible between complete strangers in real world, because we too often end up hurting people and a strange defense mechanism of formality exist among us, preventing such moments from happening. I am not a big fan of Jude Law, but he manages to seem believable and this one is not an exception. In the whole bunch of actors Juliette Binoche stands out, she has this hint of compassion in her expressions, making her look so beautiful, but it is her acting that makes this movie special and recommendable.

Like most other people commenting here, I had watched many of Anthony Minghella movies before watching this one. So I started with great expectations and watched it carefully.It is an intense drama and grips you till the end. Good, compact storyline. The casts did an amazing job. Juliet Binoche displayed one of her best performances. Excellent camera work. These are the things on the surface.On a deeper level, the strength in the portrayal of human emotions depicted in the characters is the biggest success of the movie. Characters are multi-faceted, and like regular human beings full of contradictions and even plain-faced lies and yet in the core of their hearts is the ray of human love. The end of the movie made me a little emotional reflecting that this is how we are the humans.A great movie and I would recommend it.