After the star-laden American Civil War drama Cold Mountain, Minghella turns his eye closer to home. Breaking and Entering is a multi-stranded, multi-ethnic portrait of modern London which, in its way, is just as ambitious as Cold Mountain.

One of the most difficult coups to pull off in film, with the extended production and editing periods that the medium requires, is to take a snapshot of a rapidly evolving city or culture that doesn’t feel anachronistic before it has even reached the screens. There is much to admire in Minghella’s attempt to capture the essence of a city in flux. However, the film is prone to overlabour its issues, to the extent that the narrative begins to look increasingly far-fetched. He engineers collisions between co-existing worlds where in reality far fewer would occur.

The backdrop is a King’s Cross in the process of being torn apart and rebuilt, its split personality the result of an influx of hip businesses clashing with the vice and crime traditionally associated with the area.

Jude Law plays Will, a landscape architect charged with designing public places in the regenerated King’s Cross. In a spirit of optimism, his office relocates to the area, offering a constantly replenished treasure trove of state-of-the-art computer equipment to the local criminal element — specifically the implausibly agile Bosnian immigrant Miro (Rafi Gavron).

Will’s assignment — to impose an idealised new public face on an area known for its more unsavoury reality — is a neat metaphor for his own life. His marriage to Liv (Robin Wright Penn) may appear gilded from the outside, but the pressures of rearing an autistic daughter have reduced their life to a kind of harassed but solicitous coexistence.

Will’s search for meaning in his life coincides with his search for the perpetrator of the office break-in — and Miro’s mother Amira (Juliette Binoche) comes to fascinate him. This development, together with Ray Winstone as the world’s most generous and forgiving community police officer, is where the film starts to strain at the boundaries of believability.

The implausibly upbeat ending may be a crowd-pleaser, but ultimately it’s a bit of a disappointment. A film that starts out grounded in the realities of contemporary London ends in the realms of fantasy.

WENDY IDE

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