BREAKING AND ENTERING
Movie last night. 2007 release date. Juliette Binoche and Jude Law. Written and directed by Anthony Minghella.
saw the Anthony Minghella movie last night. Think I saw it once before—maybe in late 2007 or early 2008 but maybe I just saw parts of it on tv or something. Really good—and yet slightly impossible at various times in terms of getting the plot and motivation to work successfully and smoothly. Binoche and Law, well, their chemistry made the story and so when his character has his moral epiphany and decides to stay with his wife and her daughter, that’s where the strain comes in too much because Liv, the partner who won’t yet be the wife, played by Robin Wright Penn, just isn’t as chemically wonderful as Binoche or as worthy. And so the fault line in the movie is this invisible, but not invisible enough, sense of dark, white, bad, good, moral tangle that is not tangle enough—and yet when Scott and Liv do lie to the authorities we applaud their official deceit and private moral triumph. Maybe this private-public split is something story-tellers like to craft—I think for now of Coetzee’s “Disgrace,” which I don’t like nearly as much as everybody else seems to—precisely because it seems to me all the underlying moral fabulation slices apart all too neatly and primly—giving
the impression of some sort of flexible, realistic adjustment to real situations but feeling finally just too severe and unforgiving in spite of all the talk of forgiveness and redemption in the narrative texture of the telling.
Loved the scenes of London that formed the background to this movie—almost wonder if Minghella made the movie because he wanted the chance to use this massive construction project and process—-the rebuilding the neighborhoods around Kings Cross and St Pancras train station.
Second to last movie that Minghella made—he died at 54, way too soon. The movie reminded me of this music from the early 80s—I thought it was the Morality OF Architecture—but Wiki says it is just And—Architecture & Morality is the third album by Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark, released in 1981. It is the group’s most commercially and critically successful album, selling over 3 million copies[3]. Don’t know if the movie uses any pieces from this group. Have to check. Gabriel Yared is listed as the composer.
