42 out of 68 people found the following review helpful:
faking and entering
BH101 from ,
7th September, 2007
This is not actually a bad film. The problem with it is just that there's an unmistakeable whiff of implausibility about the whole thing. Jude Law is a saintly middle class architect (who never seems to actually do much work, beyond donning a hard hat every now and again or appearing in promotional videos talking about 'nature doesn't just mean green') who takes an extraordinarily liberal approach to having his office burgled, his laptop taken - with his 'entire life' stored on it - and his car stolen. It's such a middle-class view of the world, at odds with reality. The teenage burglar turns out, of course, to be a sensitive and intelligent kid who's been led astray by his dodgy relatives, the mother is a (beautiful) refugee from Sarajevo who just needs someone to love her and soothe her troubled mind. The partner in the law firm (a not too bad Martin Freeman) starts dating one of the cleaners. A local prostitute turns out to be a useful confidante with a conscience. I can see what Minghella is trying to do with this film. It's about the interaction between the different social classes in places like Kings Cross, where new yuppie types are starting to move into socially deprived areas.... potentially this is a rich vein of material to mine, illustrating the tension between different groups and the clash of values and culture. The problem is that Minghella can only write well about one side of that equation. The view of urban deprivation and the portrayal of immigrant families struggling to survive through crime, isn't convincing at all. Compare Minghella's film to those of someone like Shane Meadows or Ken Loach; it feels inauthentic - too literary, too distant, too optimistic. The other problem is that the chemistry between Saint Jude and Juliette Brioche (mmm, brioche...) is sadly lacking. There's little to persuade you that these two people could ever really be all that interested in each other. The Bosnian angle doesn't really add a lot; it just seems shoe-horned in as an 'issue'. And not sure what movie Winstone's cop wandered in from, but he's someone else who wants to apply a bit of TLC to the problems of society and save everyone. Yes, the world would be a much better place if everyone was like Jude Law, prepared to look for and see the good in people, integrate easily with the usually invisible underclass, and attempt to understand the causes of juvenile crime, rather than . But it might be a more interesting film if it tried to portray the world as it it actually is, not some rather fake, borgeois interpretation of it.
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