Berlin International Film Festival 2006

Director; Neil Jordan

129mins.

"Breakfast on Pluto" is a very funny film, that takes full advantage of the tacky youth culture of the early 1970's from dance hall rock in provincial Ireland to the slimey vulgarity of London. The film concerns the life and times of one Patrick 'Kitten' Brady, who has been brought up as a foundling, having been conceived by a Catholic priest (Liam Neeson), who raped his housekeeper after breakfast.

Extravagantly gay, 'Kitten' (Cillian Murphy) prevails through a combination of wide-eyed cheek and naivety that has him proceed from rock and roll groupie to Soho peep show transvestite via the travails of a Catholic Grammar School, the unwelcome attentions of the homophobic IRA and a week of interrogation and beating by the British security services. He is looking for his natural mother and is eventually tipped off as to her whereabouts by the guilt ridden priest.

The German audience at the Berlinale press screening emerged rather bemused from a film (shown in english without subtitles) that includes a couple of bombings, a revenge killing, the execution of a IRA man by his own, Church arsen and Bryan Ferry in a cameo role as a psychopathic kerb-crawler and had part of the audience chuckling as it moved swiftly along from one crisis to another with 'Kitten' piecing his life together from a mosaic of broken shards.

So what kind of a film is Jordan making here? All the tradition ingredients of 20th century Irish storytelling are here, the IRA, the Catholic Church, the poverty of bigotry in grey little towns and the allure of London as a trap for the Irish of any gender or persuasion. Whether in Ireland or London, all the characters seem to part of the same mess, as Kitty's rites of passage resemble a seventeenth century novel, or a low life neo-realist take on 'Barry Lyndon'. The Irish boy abroad has a long history in Irish culture. Maybe Jordan is one of them and what we're watching here is his take on the lived experience of his youth. There's a feel to the film, an economy of story-telling, that reveals each episode with the minimum of contextualisation that means Jordan had no difficulty recognising the key features of each of characters from Patrick McCabe's novel. A neat economy of vernacular dialogue also helps to keep things moving. The key phrase, 'breakfast on Pluto' is uttered by a dope smoking mystic biker sitting under a star lit sky, but far from evoking the crock of gold at the end of the rainbow, his listeners mistake his planetary idealism as a reference to Disney's cartoon dog. Maybe that's the point, for all its cruelty, from state violence to partisan brutality, repressive Church and family, the exploitative metropolis, this was an era when, in retrospect, everything was fairly 'Mickey Mouse'.