It is 14 years since Neil Jordan had an enormous success with The Crying Game, in which one character's ambiguous sexual identity put a sensational twist in the tale of terrorism, the British military and Northern Ireland. Now Jordan revives these tropes in this adaptation of Patrick McCabe's 1998 picaresque novel Breakfast On Pluto — in which transvestism is a defiant rejection of bigotry, labels, and borders.
Cillian Murphy plays Patrick "Kitten" Brady, a drag queen with attitude from a small town in the Irish Republic, close to the border. He is the secret son of the local priest, played by Liam Neeson, who got his housekeeper pregnant and arranged for the resulting baby to be farmed out to an uncaring foster mother. Growing up in the 1960s and 1970s, Kitten scandalizes everyone with his addiction to girls' clothes and precocious sense of glamour. But Kitten is obsessed with the idea of his mother — who is supposed to have made a new life in London — and, all but penniless, he heads off to the English capital with a romantic notion of tracking her down.
We are presumably supposed to be cheering for Kitten, as a lovably exuberant rebel who makes joyless priests, cruel Brits and stone-faced Provos look silly with his antics. Actually the character is bafflingly charmless: narcissistic and unsympathetic, and the shrill, twittering monotony of Murphy's performance becomes exasperating.
PHOTO COURTESY OF SWALLOW WINGS
His story begins with a couple of CGI robins swooping over the rooftops, commenting on the action and establishing the uncertain, sub-magic-realist sense that Kitten's self-narrated mythologizing is at some level unserious. Yet Kitten appears to get involved in deadly serious situations: he experiences first-hand the casual arrogance of the British border patrol and the icy ruthlessness of the IRA. Turning tricks in London, he is nearly murdered by a curb-crawler played by Bryan Ferry (a disconcerting piece of novelty casting) and even gets blown up in a pub bombing only then to be beaten up by the London police as a typical Paddy suspect. But all the time he airily waves away any suggestion that he should take any of this seriously: "Oh serious, serious, serious ... " But isn't it serious? Kitten actually flirts with a copper who just a few days previously had stood idly by while his colleague beat him up. His unending campness saves him from being half-killed on separate occasions by the Met and the Provos; it is miraculously disarming — the cross-dressing Christ in high-heels? — but it can only be disarming in this world tinged with black-comic fantasy.
Kitten's refusal to conform to sexual stereotypes is an apolitical plague-on-both-your-houses gesture, and certainly an effective way of showing how the warring sides have something in common: nauseating macho arrogance. But having detached himself from the political contest, where are Kitten's emotional commitments? His relationship with his mother, Eileen, has most power when it is yearning fantasy: when confronted with her in the flesh, Kitten becomes tongue-tied and it is all a bit of let-down — Eileen is played by Eva Birthistle, who recently gave such an excellent performance in Ken Loach's Ae Fond Kiss. Kitten's friendship with the pregnant Charlie (Ruth Negga) is also filtered through his incessant, brittle posturing.
Stephen Rea has a droll presence as a conjuror and hypnotist who becomes captivated with Kitten, using him as an assistant and mesmerizing him into thinking his mother is in the audience, for the benefit of a heartless, chortling crowd. Yet Kitten's hypnotized rapture doesn't seem that much different from the real thing. The only person in the film who really comes to life is Brendan Gleeson, playing John-Joe, an itinerant Irish actor who briefly gets Kitten a job in a horrific Wombles theme park. As Great Uncle Bulgaria, John-Joe has a certain authority that is displayed when, in full costume, he punches the haughty English manager for accusing him unjustly of breaking a mallet. Kitten's adventures rattle along divertingly enough, but it is difficult to make any emotional investment in a character who is interested chiefly in himself.
Dec. 9 to Dec. 15 When architect Lee Chung-yao (李重耀) heard that the Xinbeitou Train Station was to be demolished in 1988 for the MRT’s Tamsui line, he immediately reached out to the owner of Taiwan Folk Village (台灣民俗村). Lee had been advising Shih Chin-shan (施金山) on his pet project, a 52-hectare theme park in Changhua County that aimed to showcase traditional Taiwanese architecture, crafts and culture. Shih had wanted to build all the structures from scratch, but Lee convinced him to acquire historic properties and move them to the park grounds. Although the Cultural
The Taipei Times reported last week that housing transactions fell 15.3 percent last month, to under 20,000 units. However, the market boomed for the first eight months of the year, and observers expect it to show growth for the year as a whole. The fall was due to Central Bank intervention. “The negative impact of credit controls grew evident for the third straight month,” said Sinyi Realty Inc (信義房屋) research manager Tseng Ching-ter (曾敬德), according to the report. Central Bank Governor Yang Chin-long (楊金龍) in October said that the Central Bank implemented selective credit controls in September to cool the housing
During the Japanese colonial era, remote mountain villages were almost exclusively populated by indigenous residents. Deep in the mountains of Chiayi County, however, was a settlement of Hakka families who braved the harsh living conditions and relative isolation to eke out a living processing camphor. As the industry declined, the village’s homes and offices were abandoned one by one, leaving us with a glimpse of a lifestyle that no longer exists. Even today, it takes between four and six hours to walk in to Baisyue Village (白雪村), and the village is so far up in the Chiayi mountains that it’s actually
It’s a discombobulating experience, after a Lord of the Rings trilogy that was built, down to every frame and hobbit hair, for the big screen, to see something so comparatively minor, small-scaled and TV-sized as The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim. The film, set 183 years before the events of The Hobbit, is a return to Middle-earth that, despite some very earnest storytelling, never supplies much of an answer as to why, exactly, it exists. Rohirrim, which sounds a little like the sound an orc might make sneezing, is perhaps best understood as a placeholder for further cinematic
RSS