The city of refuge: Deconstructing cosmopolitanism in Anthony Minghella’s Breaking and Entering

Abstract

Anthony Minghella’s feature film Breaking and Entering (2006) constitutes a kaleidoscopic portrait of the Camden cityscape around King’s Cross/St Pancras, a North London area whose gradual gentrification at the beginning of the 21st century makes it the site of perpetual clashes along diverse lines of division, whether cultural, legal, social, ethnic or personal. Minghella tells the story of the encounter between well-to-do Londoner Will Francis and two Bosnian refugees, Amira and Miro, and in so doing explores both the destructive and affirmative potential to arise from a demographics of impermanence and difference. Focusing on the ways in which the various characters perceive and make use of their urban surroundings, and in which they negotiate the boundaries of personal space (both in literal and figurative terms), this article focuses on the film’s affinity with Derrida’s deconstruction of cosmopolitanism and its relevance to London as a postcolonial European, rather than British, metropolis.

Keywords:

• British cinema
• Minghella
• Derrida
• postcolonial Europe
• Breaking and Entering

Notes

1. The France-based organization was created in 1993 with the aim of protecting, as Margaret Drabble (2001) wrote in a newspaper article, “not only freedom of speech and publication but also the physical safety of writers”. Its first president was Salman Rushdie, whose name was then, and still is, emblematic but in no way exceptional in a long list of writers, translators and publishers who suffered from censorship and violent persecutions by state policies.

2. Such as the almost imperceptible, yet decisive polysemous deployment of Rousseau’s supplement or Plato’s pharmakon.