29 March 2007

a sticky life

I just came back from watching Breaking and Entering, a new film, wrote and directed by Antony Minghella. It is a really good film but I was surprised not many people were there. I watched it in the theatre with three friends and there were a total of seven people when the film started. By the end of the show only four of us left. More sadly, they were also not too fond of the film. I couldn’t believe it. What’s wrong with people, I thought. So I will try to share what I think of the film a little bit here.

As most of the movie critics agree, the strength of the film is in the performance the supporting characters which consist of a string of fine and veteran actors. First, there is Juliette Binoche a well known French actor who plays the Bosnian immigrant single mother. Robin Wright Penn who plays the character Liv, the wife, and becomes a great balance to Binoche’s character. Martin Freeman, who we remember playing a comical character in BBC’s The Office, plays a very serious business partner of Will Francis. And most memorable to me is the acting of Vera Farmiga, recently in The Departed, as Oana the Eastern European prostitute. Jude Law, nevertheless, does business as usual and plays the main character Will Francis, a rising landscape architect in London, equally impressive.

I also like what Minghella said about London, his home city, in the interview clip on their website (http://www.breakingandentering-movie.com). Oftentimes people talk about London as a great multicultural center and sort of a melting pot of cultures. That’s a “charming” depiction of the city. But he is more interested to portray the “less charming” reality of the city. I think his attempt to describe the city this way is much more interesting and truthful than any tourist books can ever do.

His analysis is that there is a void in the English blue-collar social strata because everybody ‘suddenly’ moved to the middle class. As a consequence of this absence of English blue-collar workers, there emerged a new “invisible” class made up of immigrants and filled the vacuum in the society. Law, also on their website, described one unique aspect of the film that it is so “specific to this period”. It is a film made now and also about the “now”, such as the impact of the Bosnian conflict and the Somali immigrants for the people in the film.

With the underlying themes above, Minghella beautifully weaved several lines of interesting story ideas into one coherent film project. It is filled with metaphors about the entanglement of two worlds. It is the inner struggles in Will Francis as a husband, an architect, and as a human. It is the symbiotic coexistence between the upper middle class and the lower class. It is the tension between urban environments and its inhabitants. Through this he is trying to argue that although our reality is sticky and messy but it is also filled with beautiful encounters and personal redemptions.

A sticky life is my intepretation of the word 'sticky jam' used in the film. 'Sticky jam' is a metaphor the daughter read from a children story book at a moment when each character’s life in the film is completely entangled with each other. I think that’s a very subtle and clever climax of the story. I would also add that there is another layer of entanglement among the metaphors itself. But I will save this for another discussion when you get the chance to see the film. I would be interested to know what you think, anything, so go for it.

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