Sleeping with the
enemy’s mother

>> Anthony Minghella on his morally complex
urban melodrama Breaking and Entering

by MATTHEW HAYS

Anthony Minghella has done well with tragedy. His directorial debut, Truly, Madly, Deeply (1991) was about a widow visited by her ghost husband. The English Patient (1996) featured a romance that could not survive, despite its passion. The Talented Mr. Ripley (1999) boasted a repressed gay murderer anti-hero, while Cold Mountain (2003) also concluded on a decidedly bleak note.

Still, the director insists that not everything in his universe is entirely glum. Sitting in a hotel room at the Toronto International Film Festival, Minghella sees his latest film as a post-9/11 meditation on how modern urban life shapes our experiences. “I think life in contemporary cities means that people live next to people they think they know, but don’t really,” says Minghella. He pauses, realizes he’s said something a bit cryptic, and continues. “You make a judgment if your building has been broken into about the people who might have done the deed. ‘It was probably someone on drugs, it was probably someone from an immigrant community, from the side of the street that is so ugly.’ All of your prejudices immediately bubble to the surface.”

Getting robbed provides the narrative trigger for Minghella’s latest, fittingly titled Breaking and Entering. Jude Law plays an architect working at a posh architecture firm in London, when his firm is broken into and a laptop containing crucial information is stolen. When the firm is robbed once more, Law decides to stake out the building at night, waiting for the bums who did it to return. As the plot proceeds, Law finds himself cheating on his wife with the teen burglar’s mother, played by Juliette Binoche. Things get wickedly complex, but Minghella manages to keep us guessing about where Breaking and Entering will take us.

Suspicious minds

“Cities really are a reflection of where we are as a society. They are dysfunctional and complex, full of people who don’t know each other and never will, but who often have a great suspicion of each other.” Minghella adds that he wanted to avoid either romanticizing or vilifying London, the British capital, which has suffered both extremes on the big screen. “I didn’t want the film to be nihilistic either. I didn’t want to say that everything’s a disaster and there’s no way to fix any of this. I did not want the film to be the easy observation that the world is a mess and we are all hostage to it.”

Not surprisingly, Minghella says he has been profoundly influenced by current events, especially Britain’s involvement in the Iraq war. His cautious optimism remains intact, he reports, and that registers in the film. “We are not on a downward and inexorable spiral towards the apocalypse but there have to be some changes, both politically and socially. Our first impulse today is to punish those who offend us and it doesn’t work. You go around the world and see that retribution is not fixing anything.”

Moral ambiguity and complexity is a Minghella specialty, and in full view in Breaking and Entering. Law’s affair is a failing, but the film doesn’t seem to judge him for it. His wife, played by Robin Wright Penn, is mother to an autistic child, adding another dimension to the film. “This film is making a small plea for accommodating each other and tolerating each other, and also of not buying into this thing that the movies want to do—that is, to create characters that are not like the life that we understand or live. Like the people we’ve never met before who behave without flaw, where the good guys are ineffably good and the bad guys are ineffably bad. We learn nothing from that. I decided to do damaged people who are trying to do better.”

Talking to Minghella, I can’t help but bring up his feature The Talented Mr. Ripley, in which he cast Matt Damon as a repressed gay man attempting to climb the class ladder by stealing someone else’s identity. Though not gay himself, Minghella succeeded at the tricky task of capturing repressed sexuality to eerie perfection. “Thank you for saying that,” he says, clearly relieved. “I got a lot of hostility when I did press interviews for that film. A lot of people just wouldn’t forgive me for making that movie, so I’m always glad when people say that they like it now.”

Breaking and Entering opens Friday, Feb. 16