Minghella's final film is another set of musings on the vagaries of relationships, this time set around London's King's Cross, the station clearly symbolic of characters in transit between national identities and emotional attachments. Jude Law is an architect with grand plans for redevelopment of the area, his partner a Swedish-American drifting away from him, preoccupied with their ADHD-afflicted daughter. His offices are burgled by a gang of Bosnians, and he tracks one of them, a parkouring urchin, to his home where he falls for Juliette Binoche, the burglar's mother.This has the makings of something wider to say. Certainly, you could never accuse Minghella of short-changing us intellectually, and the script does well to sidestep the more predictable narrative twists. But...the displaced immigrants set-up can't avoid unfavourable comparisons with, say, Frears's Dirty Pretty Things (casting Binoche as a Bosnian inevitably brings Tautou as a Turk to mind), which developed emotional depth in sticking to one main theme, rather than just using the characters' varied backgrounds as a gloss. Law's character in particular is also disgracefully shallow, considering the actor's limitations, and it's asking a lot to rest our sympathies on his self-involved flitting. It ends up less than the sum of its parts, much like other pieces aspiring to profundity on urban life through interlinking disparate players, such as Paul Haggis's Crash.
5/10
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