Breakfast on Pluto-->

"Damn and blast the bleeding boring old real world with its prejudices and its sadness and its violence and its dreary old clothes...

Neil Jordan’s latest is the wild and wilfully fictional memoir of an introspective, romantic tranvestite who calls himself ‘Kitten’ (Cillian Murphy).

Sweeping us from Ireland to London, from rural backwater to the big smoke, Jordan presents this fast-flowing autobiography of a cross-dressing Dick Whittington in brief chapters that speed easily past the eye and are bolstered by a terrific soundtrack that skips from Cole Porter to T.Rex to Slade to ‘The Wombling Song’.

It’s breathless stuff – a whirlwind of colour, wit and imagination that is driven by a tender, nuanced central performance of charisma, wit and intelligence from Cillian Murphy...

‘Breakfast on Pluto’ is a delightful fairytale that uses the very real world and its hardships – a long-lost mother, terrorism, abuse – as the theatre for much camp playfulness and wish-fulfilment...

Kitten emerges as more than a fascinating caricature. He’s a splash of vibrant colour within a monochrome world, an antidote to (and reflection on) the Catholicism and conservatism of ’60s and ’70s Ireland and, on a more personal level, a credible reaction to his own abandonment and search for identity.

The film’s interests in cross-dressing, performance, the sex industry, our capital’s back alleys, the Troubles, messy childhoods and the journey from Ireland to London will be familiar to those who know ‘Mona Lisa’, ‘The Butcher Boy’, ‘The Crying Game’ and other Jordan films.

‘Breakfast on Pluto’ is a wild, imaginative and daring project that could equally be dismissed as chaotic and indulgent or as wild, imaginative and daring. I’d say it’s all these things – and it’s a hell of a ride for it." DC

Source : Time Out London Issue 1847: January 11-18 2006