Breakfast On Pluto

In Neil Jordan's The Crying Game (1992), the life and values of a guilt ridden IRA volunteer (Stephen Rea) are turned inside out when he flees to London and falls in love with the wrong kind of girl. Now, that story itself is turned inside out in Jordan's new film Breakfast On Pluto, in which sensitive cross-dressing orphan Patrick "Kitten" Braden (Cillian Murphy) leaves strife-torn Ireland for London in search of love and acceptance and finds it with, amongst others, a man played by Stephen Rea.

Kitten' s picaresque adventures in the capital lead to chance encounters with a foul-mouthed Womble impersonator (Brendan Gleeson), a creepy punter (Bryan Ferry), a magician (Rea), a confused squaddie, a gradually sympathetic police constable (Ian Hart), a strippers' collective and finally to a family reunion and even fatherhood.

Adapted, like Jordan's previous The Butcher Boy (1997), from a novel by Patrick McCabe, Breakfast On Pluto is an alternative history (in 36 headed chapters) of the Irish "troubles" in the Seventies, told from the point of view of a defiantly apolitical fantasist and occasionally interrupted by bursts of narration from a chorus of (subtitled) robin redbreasts. The film is as deliriously kitsch/fabulous as its central character, yet Patrick's total aversion to all things "serious" is never enough to keep them at bay, so that the quirkily personal and explosively political always seem to be dancing under the same mirrorball.

Kitten's first love, the touring glam rocker Billy Hatchet (Gavin Friday), is also hiding guns for the IRA. One of Patrick's childhood friends, the innocent Laurence (Seamus Reilly), is accidentally killed during an Army detonation procedure. Another, Irwin (Lawrence Kinlan), is drawn to the violent movement for a united Ireland, leaving a wife (Ruth Negga) and baby behind.

Kitten even finds himself, first a victim and then a prime suspect, in the bombing of a London nightclub, while back in the tiny border town of Tyreelin, the church, run by Kitten's father (Liam Neeson), is firebombed. Yet to this, as to everything else, Kitten responds with an unwavering smile and a cheeky one-liner, always reconfiguring the worst of times into his own camp extravaganza, as though his queer eye on the Seventies alone is enough to keep hope alive in the most desperate of circumstances.

Much of the whimsical charm of the film rests in its desultory shifts from one adventure to the next (it is, after all, a fairytale version of a life as narrated to a newborn infant), but such looseness of structure also leaves the unavoidable impression that any number of narrative episodes might have been added or subtracted without damaging the story's essential integrity. To my mind, some tighter editing would have made this the perfect morning meal, but, as it is, by the final half hour, the milk is starting to curdle and the toast get cold.

Still, Breakfast On Pluto really does manage to transform a turbulent period in the history of the British Isles into something from another planet and Murphy's turn as the irrepressible Kitten is simply mesmerising - outrageous, tender and full of the sort of deep pain that no amount of make-up can conceal.