Breaking and Entering
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Movie Reviews of Breaking and Entering
Movie Review: Haunting and redemptive
Summary: 5 Stars
This is a powerful and deeply moving human drama. Despite a few chases, it is not a formula action film, which is what some of the disappointed customers seem to have been looking for. If you are not afraid of sadness and alienation -- and characters who wrestle with them -- you should see this film. It will stay with you. The actors, both major and minor, are magnificent, and as always Juliette Binoche is a study in subtlety and nobility. Also, while it is a private drama, it is closely linked to social reality. (If you like European films, it is likely that this film will appeal to you; if you dislike them, leave it to others.)Movie Review: Better than expected
Summary: 5 Stars
This movie is better than I expected based on the Trailer and other reviews. It is a good film about relationships and how we tend to lose sight of who we are in relationship to others, especially close relationships. It reflects we need to keep present in relationships; or face the prospect of losing them. However, on the rare occasion when honesty prevails, there is a chance to re-discover ourselves and our partners in life.Movie Review: Loved it!
Summary: 5 Stars
I like a good thriller, which is why I rented the movie in the first place, and while I agree with one other reviewer that it isn't so much a thriller as a...romantic drama?...I was enthralled from beginning to end. The characters are portrayed with so much realism and dimension, I never could anticipate where the film was going to go, which is a very nice change from 99% of movies. Jude Law is more than just a hot guy!Movie Review: a bit more than i expected from reading the back of the dvd box
Summary: 4 Stars
It is a lot easier to say what the movie is not, not what it is not about, then it is to say what it is.
The back of the box calls it "sexy and seductive", that is just marketing and salesmanship, it's not really about sex, but about love and the complexity of relationships.
Certainly it has sex in it, but it is twists within layers of motivation, as complex and as twisted as people can be and often are.
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Even the title is about multiple things. The B&E that is the center point of their lives at this point, both the robbery at the office and the breaking of relationships and entering into new ones.
There are 5 characters, the movie seems to be talking about the relative priorities of these relationships in the lives of these people.
You have the relationship between the architect and his long time Swedish girlfriend.
Her relationship with an autistic 11-12 year old daughter from a marriage in Sweden that she abandoned.
A Bosnian refugee and her late teen son. who is the character that blends their lives together to made the movie.
And the major relationship that the movie investigates, the affair between the refugee and the architect.
The boy breaks into the architect's office, several times and steals the electronics, as part of a gang run by his paternal uncle.
The boy is portrayed as misguided and in need of a real strong father figure, a partial surrogate is found in a legal/social worker, but it is not enough.
His mother is haunted by the death of her husband in Sarajevo, afraid for her son and his potential to get locked up, and desperate for someone to notice and to touch her.
The architect is haunted by the break in and the loss of his stuff as well as feeling rejected and out of the loop with his girlfriend because she is so consumed with attention and worry for her troubled child. So he goes out shopping for a new relationship and beds the refugee, partly lust, partly attraction, partly to get close to her to get the son for the robbery. Mostly he really doesn't seem to know exactly why, he is just reacting, not thinking, just feeling, not reflective(at first). The refugee for her part desires the attention of a man and plans to blackmail him with pictures of her in bed with him to keep him from turning into the police what he has found out. She thinks he is only in it for the sex and revenge against the son(she doesn't think she is the reason for the affair), but he seems unaware of this potential motivation (striking at the son through her) being too interesting in the physical passion. I think she is constantly doing it, partially, for her son.
So you can see where the complexity of the movie comes from. Motivations are misread, not just by the other person but by the person themselves. This character development takes time and as a result (plus our addiction to action in movie) the movie seems to move slowly for the first hour, it is an illusion, for much is being communicated to us, just not in outward battles, but with some subtlety. Stick with it, the movie will reward a careful and close watching, it is not the usual dim witted fare, but something to think about.
It is the relative priorities that is interesting, how they change as the people see the results and ramifications of their actions. There is a point, when the architect sits down by his girlfriend's bath and confesses all and asks her forgiveness that the movie begins to see/show what honesty can do, rather than the dishonesty and lies that have dominated the previous few days (maybe a week or two). He really does see what he has to lose and tries to grab her before she leaves him.
As for the relationship of the architect and the refugee, there is an extraordinarily well done scene on a beautiful hillside park where she falls to her knees begging him to help her save her son from jail. He keeps saying that he can't, what he can't do is confess to his girlfriend and tell her of the affair and his need to break away from the noose of the daughter and her mother's deep love. What is the central piece of the movie is his realization that he wants to be inside that circle, part of the pain and hope of caring for a deeply troubled child, as part and parcel of the bargain of being in her mother's life, a neat touch, not usual in a movie. The male actually realizes that relationships are more than sex.
Two relationships are constant, the mothers for their offspring. They never waver from that commitment, willing to sacrifice the relationships with the men in their lives for it. Saddened by the prospect of losing him, but never challenging the priority of this mother-child bond. The refugee son realizes both what his mom sacrificed and does for him and what the architect finally fesses up to (although both he and his girlfriend continue the lying at the court) the affair and yet still in the end, stands up for the refugee and her son.
I liked the movie, if i had stopped it after an hour i would have missed it all. Glad i didn't, from the reviews on amazon, many people did make this mistake however.
We are not used to such deep and troubling movies, at least i am not, preferring to get my thinking from books rather than movies, but this movie is a welcomed exception to this. Just stick with it, rewind when needed, stop if you need to yell at the characters for their stupid decisions, get a bit involved. i think you will be rewarded with insight and a bit of tears. thanks for the movie guys.
Movie Review: Intriguing story marred by some careless direction
Summary: 4 Stars
Anthony Minghella, who won an Oscar for The English Patient (1996), wrote and directed this interesting film starring Jude Law as an architect who gets involved with a Bosnian ex-pat (Juliette Binoche) and her son. I found it mostly satisfying, but somehow unconvincing. The fact that Jude Law is a few years younger than either Robin Wright Penn, who played his wife Liv, or Binoche who played Amira was not the problem. What bothered me was the incompleteness of Will Francis's character. To make this work, Will had to be a philandering sort of guy who this time gets involved in something more than the usual sexcapade. We need to see Will fooling around before he gets involved with Amira, otherwise his insistence on quick sex with an exotic woman just doesn't make sense. Not only that but the lesson he presumably learns from the experience is not as compelling.
And as much as I admire Juliette Binoche I really thought her character could have been spiced up a bit. She needs to look more exotic and to have a kind of saucy streak above the straight-laced mother and seamstress role she is forced to play. We needed to see her as sexually frustrated, yes, but also as someone who is awakened by being made love to by Jude Law! For some reason Minghella underplayed this possibility. I think she should have just gone bananas over Will, and that would have created the kind of emotional conflict that allowed her to feel guilt about arranging to have the photos taken of her and Will in bed together. Although this was blackmail for her son, it was--or should have been--a betrayal of love. Instead of exuding such a goody-goody persona, Amira should have projected a more compromised person, someone who would cynically sleep with a guy and conspire to photograph him in a compromised position instead of first asking him if he would help her son.
There were some schlocky details that Minghella did not pay enough attention to that detract from the effectiveness of the film. First, it is not clear why Will should be able to sleep so soundly in the afternoon in adulterous bed of Amira's friend that her friend can enter and take a dozen or so shots of him with Amira moving around on the bed in different poses. I kept expecting to see something showing us he was drugged!
The fact that the police detective befriended the boy was okay. Cops sometimes do that sort of thing. They like to play big brother (in a positive way), but I could not believe that Will would refuse to help Amira's son when she is literally on her knees begging him! Minghella played it in this artificial way so as to set up the climactic scene when Will and Liv arrive together at the hearing. In real life Will could not say no when Amira is begging him because (1) he does want to help the boy, (2) she still has the power to embarrass Will and his wife even though she has given him the incriminating photo negatives, (3) it is totally out of character for him to suddenly care so much about the affair coming out, and (4) he immediately confesses it to his wife anyway.
In the scene when Will returns to his wife after the stakeout smelling of the prostitute's perfume, we have Liv smelling it, and then when he opts for a shower, she pulls him close for immediate sex. I think he should have explained it. After all, he was not involved with the prostitute. He rejected her and that would be believable. In fact in his place I couldn't resist talking about this strange prostitute (played very enticingly by Vera Farmiga in a bit part). It would be interesting. Apparently Minghella was making some point by having Liv want to have sex with him immediately; however that was never developed. We are left imagining that the perfume or the thought of her husband with a prostitute somehow aroused her, which seems unlikely, but if that was the case, it needed to be developed.
Why the robbers would come back to the scene of the crime a third time to commit yet the same crime in the same manner is beyond, I would think, the reach of most of the world's dumbest criminals, and these guys weren't that dumb.
And there were some dangling strings: why DID the prostitute steal his car and then return it? Why was the boy so lost and then suddenly so repentant and seemingly on the right track? This was underdeveloped.
The scene with the autistic daughter Bea at Will's workplace was played so heavy-handedly that we knew what was going to happen before it happened--and what was the point? By the way, her relationship with Will was also not fully developed. (Perhaps Minghella's script was too demanding for the director!)
I am sorry to be so critical but this could have been an outstanding movie, and I get irritated when directors go to print so quickly. Minghella is never going to be a great director until he takes a page from Stanley Kubrick's book and polishes every scene and irons out the wrinkles. As it is, Breaking and Entering is a pretty good film, and certainly no Jude Law fan should miss it.