Breakfast on Pluto

Made by Neil Jordan, of The Crying Game fame, it’s another gender-bending story, and it even has Stephen Rea in it. It’s based on a novel by Patrick McCabe, though it seems they changed a huge number of details. Cillian Murphy is a transgendered Irishman who has never tried to conceal her sexual identity. She sets out for London to find her mother, who abandoned her as an infant. To get into something like this I have to have some sympathy for the character, and I frankly found “Kitten” to be grating on just about every nerve I’ve got. She seemed utterly clueless about so many things, I just wanted to slap her around from time to time … not from any homophobia, I assure you, but just because I didn’t like her. Finally, about halfway through, I decided I didn’t really care to see how the story came out. I’m sure this will resonate well with a lot of people, but it just didn’t with me.