Breakfast on Pluto **** (2005, Cillian Murphy, Morgan Jones, Eva Birthistle, Liam Neeson, Stephen Rea, Brendan Gleeson, Eamonn Owens) – Classic Movie Review 830

‘Same world, different planet!’ In brave, bold turn, and looking pretty as a picture, Cillian Murphy is a fabulous knockout as an Irish boy called Patrick Braden, who wants to be a girl called Kitten and tries to live his life as one in the difficult Ireland of the Seventies.

He/she’s living in the same world as everyone else but, in Seventies Ireland, she’s on a different planet from them because her gender identity is beyond the town’s understanding. So, the young trans woman comes of age by leaving her Irish town for London, to look for her mother and find like-minded folk.

This excellent, edgy, quirky feel-good 2005 film comes from the imaginative, challenging director of Mona Lisa, (1984) The Crying Game (1992) and Interview with the Vampire (1994).

The provocative, intelligent, amusing and touching script by co-writer/director Neil Jordan is spot on target, adapting the book by Patrick McCabe, along with the author. In the fast-moving, eventful, busy story, Kitten is taken in by a rock band, falls for its lead singer, has a run-in with the IRA, is arrested by London cops, works in a peep show and poses as a survey researcher for the phone company.

And Murphy gets ideal support from Liam Neeson as Father Bernard, Jordan regular Stephen Rea as Bertie and Brendan Gleeson as John Joe Kenny aka Uncle Bulgaria (the Wombles stuff is hilarious).

Eamonn Owens from Jordan’s The Butcher Boy (1997) plays Jackie Timlin.

The great Seventies soundtrack helps to bring back the period to perfection.

Rea had already played a man dating a trans woman in The Crying Game. Though she plays his mother, Eva Birthistle is only two years older than Murphy. The film thanks the people of Callan County, Kilkenny, where it was filmed, along with studio work at Ardmore Studios, Bray, County Wicklow, as well as on location in London.

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