Directed and written by Anthony Minghella.

Will Francis - Jude Law; Amira - Juliette Binoche; Liv - Robin Wright Penn; Sandy - Martin Freeman;
Bruno Fella - Ray Winstone; Oana - Vera Farmiga; Miro - Rafi Gavron; Bea - Poppy Rogers;
Rosemary - Juliet Stevenson

The possible upsides of lying and being burglarized are among the numerous topics held up to the light for close examination in Breaking and Entering. Anthony Minghella's film is conspicuously thoughtful and civilized as it provides a close-up snapshot of particular aspects of life in London at this moment.

After big international productions The English Patient, The Talented Mr. Ripley and Cold Mountain, this is the first time Minghella has worked from his own original screenplay since his debut film, Truly, Madly, Deeply. It's very much the picture of a writer taking stock of the society and city in which he lives, sorting things out in his own mind in a way that will prove intellectually engaging and meaningful for an audience.

The public that will respond to his musings is mostly the same one that reads books and attends serious theater, the gentrification class that is now gingerly moving into the film's very specific setting, the dicey but quickly changing King's Cross area in North London. King's Cross Station is known to the world as the embarkation point of Harry Potter's Hogwarts Express, but the real neighborhood surrounding it has long teemed with immigrants and criminals.

The face of King's Cross is now being altered by England's biggest urban renewal project, and characters very much like Will Francis (Jude Law) who, with partner Sandy (Martin Freeman), has opened a high-end landscape architecture office in the area. In short order, the building is broken into not once but twice and robbed of all its high-tech equipment. Laying in wait at night for the intruder to strike yet again, Will sees him and chases him far enough to know what flat he has run into.

Will is most annoyed at the fact that his "whole life" is on his stolen laptop. That life consists of a well-appointed but trying home life with girlfriend Liv (Robin Wright Penn), a Scandinavian woman with a 13-year-old daughter, Bea (Poppy Rogers), who doesn't eat or sleep and compulsively practices gymnastics day and night. This situation deeply concerns Liv, a depressive herself whose therapy sessions with Will cast light on the deficiencies in their relationship.

The gradually unfolding story has Will making the acquaintance of the young burglar's attractive mother, Amira (Juliette Binoche), a Bosnian refugee and tailor to whose flat he brings some clothes for repair. Will says nothing of the crimes, but verifies the guilt of Amira's son by finding his stuff in the kid's room. In turn, the 15-year-old son, Miro (Rafi Gavron), finds the business card Will has left at the flat and now knows the game is up.

With things slowly atrophying at home with Liv, Will draws closer to Amira and rashly instigates an affair, prompting unsettling feelings. Amira, who would like to return to Sarajevo where her husband died, is vulnerable on every level.

What happens thereon involves several curious turns of emotions and justice, of both the legal and ethical varieties, leading to an almost startlingly upbeat and resolved result for all concerned. As such, this is one of the optimistic contemporary dramas of recent times. Or perhaps it's just wishful thinking.

Pic is absorbing, but in a decidedly low-key way. Partly this stems from Law's character, who is polite and imperturbable to a fault. As he at one point remarks, "I tidy up," a phrase that could be applied to his function with his family, Amira and her son, his office and the neighborhood. But one seldom really knows what's going on inside him, which is a problem when he begins spending time with Amira. Law's reading of

Will is credible but lacks force, which may or may not be intentional.
Even more inscrutable is Liv, who suffers from "Scandinavian spells." A frustrated Will asks her point-blank what she wants, and it's impossible to know the answer; as good an actress as she is, Wright Penn can't clarify it. A related problem is her daughter, whose condition is so weird one can't get a handle on what to make of it.

Binoche, physically unchanged as ever, plays Amira's controlled anguish with skill, and Gavron is a very good-looking kid with presence. Vera Farmiga has a high old time in her brief role as an Eastern European hooker who would like to make a client out of Will.
Benoit Delhomme's lensing has an understated elegance, and Lisa Gunning's supple editing and Gabriel Yared and Underworld's score is frequently working to achieve emotional turbulence and counterpoint.

Q. It's been some time since you wrote and directed a film set in Britain. Why now?
A. After I made Truly, Madly Deeply I imagined I was going to make another British-based film and I started writing a story based on the idea of a break in, called Breaking & Entering. I write in notebooks and I've got two which say very proudly on the front, Breaking & Entering. The idea was I would write a story about a couple who come home from a party to discover that their house has been burgled. They try to do an inventory of what's been taken and they discover that things have been added. What had been added were somehow indications of problems in their relationship. I could never really progress that story very much. But when I was shooting Cold Mountain with Tim Bricknell we were on top of some hill somewhere, and I thought I had to go home and make a film about home, about London, and we got a call from our new offices to say we'd been burgled.

That call became a weekly call for about a year, where we had 16 incidents I think - our offices were in the process of renovation and they were being burgled like a sport. The people who we left behind while we were away were increasingly exasperated and worried about these burglaries. So, something tripped in my head and I realised that perhaps in that story of burglaries there might be a way of looking at London. Particularly when I came home and started to meet some of the agencies around crime in London - the police, social workers, community. I was struck by, first of all, how generous, committed and decent a lot of these people were. But also it made me think in a way I'd never thought before about the idea of a victim of a crime and the perpetrator of a crime being in the same room, what that meant and what that might do. That's such a theatrical idea apart from anything else. And so the story emerged by this collision of this imaginative idea I'd had a decade ago and this real thing that started happening to us while I was shooting Cold Mountain.

Q. Was it ever hard shooting on some of the London locations?
A. Well, we shot a sequence on Primrose Hill, a very traumatic sequence between Juliette Binoche and Jude Law, and Harvey Weinstein [producer] came to visit us that day. He looked at this hill, which was full of people, and said nervously: "Are these all extras?" I said that we didn't have any extras, we just had Jude and Juliette - to shoot in London we have to take what we can get. It's true to say that we shot the scene for the better part of a day with absolutely no interference from anybody, with a great deal of interest and support and quietness. It was extraordinary and I was very proud of London on that. We both [Anthony and Jude] talked a lot about how it was our neighbourhood, how we both lived close to that hill and it seemed that what could be described as indifference is sometimes people being good hearted. I think we found a lot of that when we were shooting, that it's a wonderful city. The thing about London is that you can tell any story you want to tell, you can find anything you want to find. You can find ugliness, you can find beauty, you can find curmudgeonly people and obviously generous people. I think the truth of the film is that we were welcomed in London and we were thrilled to be shooting a city that we live in and loved.

Q. Did you set out to change the perception of the Bosnian refugee experience in Britain?
A. Sometimes I come away from press conferences about other films thinking I wish we'd talked more about what the film is about. With this one, all we're talking about - which is wonderful - is what the film is about. At some level I was trying to write a story about a marriage, and a marriage in modern London - and a modern marriage where there's no ring or contract involved. It spilled out, necessarily, into conversation that I think there's an invisible class in London that sustains us. If you took the migrant class away from London it would implode, it couldn't be sustained if this invisible class disappeared. As my family is an migrant family and my wife's family is a migrant family, I have a particular predilection towards celebrating the fact that it's a fantastic community of all sorts and all colours and all kinds and all creeds.
It's not always compatible - we share the same geographic space, but we don't always share the same values or the same expectations, or the same privileges. That leads to conflict, it leads to burglaries, it leads to petty crime. So, inevitably the film takes a view which argues for compassion and for a second chance. Everybody in the movie gets a second chance.

Q. Can you talk about your relationship with Jude Law?
A. There's nobody better to go to work with on any day than Jude. Not only because of how he is with me, but how he is with the crew, how he is with everybody else. I did a day's acting a few weeks ago and for the first time I experienced what it was like to be a guest on somebody else's set. I realised that how the other actors treat you determines how you're able to do yourself. The one thing that Jude does is this welcome which enables other actors to do well. So that's part of the reason why I wanted to work with him, because it's such a great collaboration.

Q. Can you talk a little more about the conciliation scene. Was it a kind of conciliation process for the actors?
A. It was the most difficult scene that we shot in the film because all of the individual actors were conflicted about what was happening. I then realised that we were touching on something very interesting, which is how do you forgive? Is it appropriate to forgive? Is it right that in this story the forgiveness comes through a lie? The 'it' of the film suddenly was much more urgent than I'd ever experienced before.

Q. Do you have any plans to work with Jude Law on something for the stage?
A. We'd like to do a play I think. I'm a very dull person in terms of actors. I find an actor I like working with and I want them to be in every project. I've tried to get Robin Wright Penn in every movie, anything I'm doing. And Martin, although he insulted me every hour of every day of the work, it was still an honour. It was great to have Juliet Stephenson in this film, to have Ray Winstone working with me again in the film. I love that process but in the last year I've done some work in the theatre again and it was a fantastic experience for me and I would love to go back and perhaps direct a play or write a play. And if Jude or anybody else was interested in doing that, then great.

Q. Was the use of the Bosnian footage intended to put into context the troubles of these characters?
A. I suppose that one of the things I would say is that it can't always be that the only place you reserve judgement is for the underprivileged. If you're saying this is a film which says, "give everybody a second chance", you can't be punished because you have a profession any more than you can be punished because you don't have one. There's got to be some sense of fairness in the way that you view all the characters. And I'm not judging anybody in the film at all. We looked at that footage from Bosnia and actually didn't use the strongest parts that we found because it felt like it would have been exploitive of that material to put it in as profound a way as it was in its undiluted form.

Just as when we were shooting in King's Cross, Juliette, Jude and I drove past the floral tributes for 7/7. We didn't use that footage because it seemed to be trying to inflate the value of fiction with some of the pain of life. But obviously I was trying to say "think again" about somebody you might judge on one level. In the same way as when I first came to London, I remember that I was a young playwright trying to make my way and I was lodging on somebody's couch. They had a cleaner on Fridays who was Argentinean. One day, she was vacuuming around my papers and I spoke to her and asked where she was from and she said Buenos Aires. It transpired she was a union analyst who had escaped from Argentina and come to work in London and found work as a cleaner.

I realised straight away, as somebody who'd had quite an innocent background, that people were not what they seemed to be in London and the more time that fiction allowed you to think all the way around something before you judged them.