Anthony Minghella’s previous three films — The English Patient, The Talented Mr Ripley and Cold Mountain — took him to distant times and places. His latest is set in present-day London, but that hasn’t kept him from indulging his taste for dramas of high passion involving good-looking people.

Jude Law plays Will, an affluent, linen-suited architect whose long-standing relationship with a beautiful Swede (Robin Wright Penn) has become strained. After a series of burglaries at his firm’s office in King’s Cross, he trails one of the teenage thieves, and so meets the boy’s mother, a widowed Bosnian émigrée (Juliette Binoche) who works in her tiny flat as a tailor. Before Will can tell her about her son’s pilfering, he gets the hots for her. Within days, they are sleeping with each other — but is the seamstress secretly preparing to stitch Will up?

This is very much an “only in the movies” kind of plot, but that’s not a problem in itself. What really scuppers the film’s credibility is that Minghella’s 21st-century Londoners sometimes talk as if they were in one of his grandiose period epics. At other times, they just sound plain weird. In a heart-to-heart with his betrayed girlfriend, Will says: “I don’t even know how to be honest. Maybe that’s why I like metaphors.” Maybe it is, but even linen-suited architects surely don’t speak like that in reality. The line comes straight from Minghella, who is always drawing attention to the film’s themes and motifs.

Will’s experiences teach him that he must look beyond his architectural plans for run-down King’s Cross to understand the lives of the people who actually live there. Yet the film itself is more a diagram of human behaviour than a convincing picture of it.

BACKGROUND

• Breaking and Entering

• Breaking and Entering - Sunday Times review

• Minghella's democratic vision of cinema, but not as we know it

Sultry prima donna

Juliette Binoche does sex scenes only if it’s necessary. This time she says it is

Related Internet Links

• 2007 London Film Festival coverage

• Times Online Film Trailers

And it’s not as if the topics covered in that diagram are hugely interesting. The film is polished, briskly paced and full of incident, so there’s never a totally dull moment, but nor is there anything that hits home.

The most promising subject is the awkwardness felt by well-meaning moneyed folk when dealing with people from the bottom rungs of the economic ladder. Martin Freeman, as Will’s business partner, has some broad but likeable comic scenes in this vein.

Minghella’s main concern, though, is a humourless inquiry into the complexities of the heart, and the focus of this is Will, a bland individual whose vague agonies show us nothing intriguing. I’m not saying that ordinary middle-class angst is unworthy of dramatic treatment, but in a movie that feels free to embellish real life in various ways, the main character can surely be allowed a distinctive personality.

Breaking and Entering, Two stars
15, 118 mins

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