BREAKFAST ON PLUTO: Irish Film Week

BREAKFAST ON PLUTO follows Patrick “Kitten” Braden, a young transgender woman growing up in a small Irish town before leaving for London in search of the mother who abandoned her as a baby. Cillian Murphy plays Kitten with a mixture of wit, stubbornness and romantic optimism, moving through foster homes, bands, nightclubs, relationships and increasingly dangerous encounters while refusing to become the person everyone around her expects.

Adapted from Patrick McCabe’s novel, the film is structured as a series of short chapters that let Kitten drift through Ireland and Britain during the 1960s and 70s. The Troubles are always somewhere nearby, but Jordan keeps the story anchored to Kitten’s personal search for family, identity and somewhere she can live on her own terms. Political violence, Catholic morality and social conservatism keep intruding, while Kitten responds by turning life into performance whenever reality becomes intolerable.

I’ve programmed BREAKFAST ON PLUTO immediately after THE BUTCHER BOY because both films come from the same remarkable collaboration between Neil Jordan and novelist Patrick McCabe. THE BUTCHER BOY turns childhood alienation inward until it becomes rage. BREAKFAST ON PLUTO takes an outsider and sends her outward into the world, using humour, clothes, music and imagination as forms of survival. They make a fascinating double bill because the ingredients are similar, but the emotional destination is completely different.

Cillian Murphy’s performance became the film’s defining achievement and earned him a Golden Globe nomination for Best Actor in a Musical or Comedy. At the Irish Film & Television Awards, Murphy won Best Actor, Neil Jordan won Best Director, and Jordan and McCabe won Best Script. Nearly twenty years later, the film also looks like an important bridge between several strands of modern Irish cinema: Neil Jordan’s long interest in outsiders, Patrick McCabe’s darkly comic writing, the political memory of the Troubles, and the emergence of Cillian Murphy as one of Ireland’s most internationally recognised actors.