Breakfast on Pluto

Movie
German title	Breakfast on Pluto
Original title	Breakfast on Pluto
Country of production	Ireland , Great Britain
original language	English
Publishing year	2005
length	129 minutes
Age rating	FSK 12 ; JMK 14
Rod
Director	Neil Jordan
script	Neil Jordan and Patrick McCabe (novel)
production	Neil Jordan, Alan Moloney and Stephen Woolley
music	Anna Jordan
camera	Declan Quinn
cut	Tony Lawson
occupation
	Cillian Murphy : Patrick "Kitten" Brady; Liam Neeson : Father Bernard; Ruth Negga : Charlie; Laurence Kinlan : Irwin; Stephen Rea : Bertie; Brendan Gleeson : John Joe Kenny; Conor McEvoy : young Patrick Brady; Bryan Ferry : Mr. Silky String, the "prostitute killer"; Liam Cunningham : Biker; Neil Jackson : Man at the disco; Mary Coughlan : housekeeper; Pat McCabe : Peepers Egan; Gavin Friday : Billy Hatchett; Antonia Campbell-Hughes : Stripper; Dominic Cooper : Squaddie at the disco; Ian Hart : PC Wallis; Steven Waddington : Inspector Routledge; James Greene : Gentleman;

Breakfast on Pluto is a fiction film by Irish director Neil Jordan from 2005. The independent film is based on a novel by Patrick McCabe and has been produced by the film studios Pathé Pictures International , Bórd Scannán na hÉireann, Number 9 Films Ltd., Parallel Films and the Northern Ireland Film and Television Commission produced. The German premiere took place within the Berlin International Film Festival in February 2006. The regular German theatrical release was on May 25, 2006.

action

Ireland , 1958: After his housekeeper left him, Father Bernard, parish priest in the village of Tyreelin, near the Northern Irish border, found an abandoned baby on his doorstep. The boy is handed over to the old pub owner Ma Braden. Ten years later she catches young Patrick in his stepsister's clothes and loudly curses the day she took him in. Patrick, who until then believed that Ma Braden was his mother, is soon tormented by the question of who his birth mother is.

Patrick comes a little closer to his mother's identity when he and his friends Irwin, Laurence (a man with Down syndrome ) and young Charlie make the village unsafe in their role-playing games as IRA rebels or killer robots. Laurence's good-natured father reveals three facts about his mother to Patrick. According to this, the woman who abandoned him is said to be Eily Bergin, the most beautiful girl in town at the time. Laurence's father claims to have met Eily, who resembled the movie star Mitzi Gaynor , once on the streets of London.

A few years later, Patrick, who is now using mascara , discovers a check from Father Bernard in a letter addressed to Ma Braden. Determined to solve the mystery of his parents, he confronts Father Bernard in the confessional with his knowledge and also lets the name Eily Bergins echo. The conversation ends with the clergyman leaving the confessional without Patrick being able to learn anything new. To the horror of his teachers, the boy then reads an essay in which he tells the story of Father Bernard and his innocent housekeeper in great detail. Sanctions at school and at home to tame the boy turn Patrick into a more garish personality named Kitten .

Patrick is now called Kitten and attracts the hatred of the villagers when he goes to a disco with his friends Charlie, Irwin and Laurence. But the friends can be saved by a peaceful motorcycle group. Under the influence of dope , the night becomes a kind of cosmic self-discovery trip for kittens: After she was expelled from school for further offenses, she says goodbye to Ma Braden and leaves the village.

She joins the band Billy Hatchet And The Mohawks , who appear as Wild West Indians in their appearances with heavy make-up. Kitten soon falls in love with the apparently straight band leader Billy, whose first appearance as Squaw the band is a failure. Then Billy puts Kitten in a trailer on the coast. In the new home, Kitten cooks for the band leader and soon takes on her role as a housewife and lover of Billy. By chance she discovers that Billy, who sympathizes with the IRA , is lending his trailer to the terrorists as a weapon stash. Irwin, who is now in a relationship with Charlie, has also joined the IRA. When a car bomb detonates, Laurence is killed.

After Laurence's funeral, Kitten returns to Billy's trailer, which she subjects to a thorough “spring cleaning”. She throws the hidden weapons into the sea to the annoyance of the incoming IRA members. Thanks to their behavior and friendship with IRA member Irwin, Kitten struggles to get away with their lives. Irwin is forced to take part in the group's campaign of revenge as the deadly bomb was detonated by a group that sought to discredit the IRA. Irwin witnesses the IRA's bloody revenge.

Kitten travels to London to find her suspected mother, Eily Bergin. The two addresses that she comes across during her research lead nowhere. She wanders disoriented through London, finally finds a place to sleep in a fairytale castle in a children's theme park. Here Kitten gets to know the choleric Irishman John-Joe, who earns his living as a Womble in the park. Kitten also plays as a Womble. Because of her feminine appearance, she makes the acquaintance of a prostitute murderer, but is able to escape him. She meets the run-down magician Bertie, who falls in love with Kitten. Kitten soon appears as an assistant in Bertie's show programs, where she lets herself be sawed up and hypnotized. During a hypnosis show in which Kitten identifies every object as her mother, Charlie suddenly appears in the audience, grabs Kitten and snatches her away from the disturbed magician.

Charlie came to London with Irwin. While Irwin is still very close to the IRA and forwards mysterious packets, Charlie has been impregnated by her boyfriend. She plans to abort the child. Together with Kitten, she goes to a clinic, but at the last minute she decides not to have an abortion. When Kitten is dancing with a soldier in a disco, a bomb explodes and Kitten is hospitalized injured. When it is discovered there that she was born a man, the police are called because the "terror transvestite" is suspected of having planted the bomb. During the brutal interrogation, Kitten invents the existence of a terrorist cell . After a week, the police let kitten go who don't want to leave her safe cell.

Kitten lands on the line. But the policeman Wallis, who interrogated Kitten, takes pity on her, gets her off the street and gets her a job with a group of ex-prostitutes who run a legal peep show . Here Kitten is caught up with her past again when Father Bernard stands in front of her peep window. He explains that he always loved Patrick / Kitten but never knew how to tell her. He leads Kitten to her still beautiful mother Eily, who ekes out a boring life as a housewife. Eily has a 13-year-old son, also named Patrick, and a daughter, and she is pregnant. Kitten poses as a telephone company employee and asks to be admitted. Overwhelmed by her emotions, Kitten hastily leaves her mother and half-brother after getting to know each other.

In a letter from Charlie, she learns that Irwin was murdered. The police used Charlie Dope to extort information about Irwin's activities in the IRA, which the terrorist group bloody avenged. Kitten returns to Ireland, where the pregnant Charlie has already been taken in by Father Bernard. The strange trio - a graying pastor, an unmarried pregnant woman and a transgender woman - attracts the anger of the population. One night the church and parsonage are set on fire by a Molotov cocktail . Everything burns to the ground. Father Bernard sends Charlie and Kitten to London to wait for the child to be born. He promises to comply as soon as the child is born.

During a follow-up examination for Charlie, Kitten is waiting with the baby in front of the hospital, and there she approached her half-brother Patrick, who is waiting for his mother. Charlie and Eily come out of the building almost at the same time. Kitten notices her mother and sends Patrick back to her. Eily's paths with her son and kitten, Charlie and the baby part.

History of origin

Breakfast on Pluto is based on the 1998 novel of the same name by the Irish writer Patrick McCabe. The book received critical acclaim and was shortlisted for the prestigious Booker Prize . The title is based on a 1970s song by Don Partridge , a one-man folk band called King of the London Buskers . The director Neil Jordan took on the material, he had successfully filmed McCabe's novel The Butcher Boy in 1997 . Jordan was interested in it mainly for the question: "How anyone survived an aggressive world just the fact that it is he himself?" . Jordan had already finished the script three or four years before the start of shooting, but only pushed the project forward when he discovered parallels to his own life. The director and screenwriter had also spent the 1960s and 1970s in Dublin and London and indirectly witnessed the London attacks. In the tradition of the great Irish writers such as Sean O'Casey , he placed the material between tragedy and comedy. Like Jordan's film The Crying Game , for which he won the 1993 award for best adapted screenplay, Breakfast on Pluto is also about transvestism and terrorism. Even so, the director sees more connections to The Butcher Boy , as they both show a distorted childhood from the Irish mixture of social pressure and madness. “'Pluto' is really more about a beautiful soul than politics and violence,” says Jordan.

production

Filming began in September 2004. The film was shot in the Irish county of Kilkenny and in Great Britain . The film is divided into 36 different chapters.

reception

The tragicomedy premiered on September 3, 2005 at the US Telluride Film Festival . After the film was shown at the Toronto International Film Festival (September 10), the New York Film Festival (October 1) and the Paris Gay and Lesbian Film Festival (October 23), Breakfast on Pluto was officially launched on September 16. October 2005 in three US cinemas. The film grossed $ 33,279 on the opening weekend and grossed just $ 171,967 on December 18, 2005. The fifteenth directorial work by director Neil Jordan received critical acclaim for its narrative structure and the acting performance of lead actor Cillian Murphy , which was rated as one of the best of the 2005 cinema year.

Reviews

"Adorable and hopeful." (Chicago Sun-Times)
"The acting performance of Cillian Murphy ... is terrific." (Globe and Mail)
“Murphy's Tour de Force as the eternally optimistic Patrick certainly deserves an Oscar nomination. Thanks to Jordan's brilliant storytelling, Breakfast on Pluto is one of the few films this year that's really worth remembering. ”(New York Post)
“Murphy is an actor to watch out for. Even in heels. "(Rolling Stone)
"... ambitious and infinitely captivating." (San Francisco Chronicle)
"A clever, handmade fairy tale ..." (Toronto Star)

Remarks

The piano music used sparsely in the film comes from Neil Jordan's daughter Anna Jordan.
The village "Tyreelin" , in which the main character grows up, is fictitious.
This is the thirteenth collaboration on a film project for producer Stephen Woolley and director Neil Jordan.

Awards

At the Golden Globe Awards ceremony on January 16, 2006 , Cillian Murphy was nominated for Best Actor in a Comedy or Musical. At the counter-event to the Golden Globes, the Satellite Awards , Murphy was nominated in the same category, but had to admit defeat to American actor Terrence Howard ( Hustle & Flow ).