Автор: Kendon Polak

Cillian Murphy charms the pants off in Neil Jordan's rambling Lucky Man romp.

Each year at the Toronto International Film Festival, there invariably emerge two or three audience favourites'—rarely the high-profile, heavily-hyped Hollywood variety—which utterly enrapture the regular, non-industry, ticket-buying festivalgoers, despite the big-studio buzz of mainstream American fare. Breakfast on Pluto was one of this year's most beloved crowd-pleasers—drawing diverse, ardent crowds, willing, as always, to endure lengthy, round-the-block lineups to get in.

Thunderous applause from the 1,237 attendees at the world premiere on September 10 greeted director Neil Jordan (whose Oscar-winning IRA thriller The Crying Game, which also premiered at the Toronto festival, blew us away 13 years ago) and man-of-the-moment Cillian Murphy, who is simultaneously Jordan's leading man and leading lady, starring here as transgendered Irish cabaret singer Patrick "Kitten" Braden in Jordan's fetching adaption of the bestselling, coming-of-age novel by Patrick McCabe.

Murphy wraps up his North American breakthrough year with a rollicking role that is at polar opposites to his venomous, psycho performances as mad psychiatrist Dr. Crane in Batman Begins and the cold-as-ice terrorist in Red Eye. As a woman, the Cork-born actor's piercingly blue eyes are equally as disarming in the guise of the blissfully naive Kitten as they've proven villainous in his most recent roles. Kitten's starry-eyed gullibility and cockeyed optimism are utterly infectious.

"The residue of this character was quite hard to shake off," Murphy says. "Of all the characters I've played, I think I fell in love the most with this character. It's this unfailing, relentless warmth she had, even though she was hurt and damaged. I loved the fact that the police officer that beats the living shit out of her eventually ends up caring for her and pulling her and looking after her. I fell in love deeply with the character's innate goodness—she's beautifully well-intentioned. The soul of this character represents a lot of the misfits of the world that get treated badly just because they trust too easily and fall in love too easily."

Speaking the morning after the Toronto premiere, Murphy was clearly knocked off his feet by the film—the first time he'd seen it—and by the audience's exuberant response.

"From however many people were in that cinema last night, I seemed to get a very positive vibe, so you gotta trust that. I'm very proud. I think people like this film because it takes risks. Neil gives the audience credit for being intelligent. He says, 'Look, I know you'll be able to follow this flight of fancy. I know you'll be able to go with the character. I trust that you can follow this.' Not like with certain movies nowadays where they go, 'Well, obviously you couldn't do that because the audience wouldn't f*cking (sic) understand,' you know? Whereas Neil understands. In all his movies he takes for granted the audience's IQ and the discerning nature of his audience."

Pluto is the first film Jordan has directed in three years (since the Nick Nolte casino heist movie The Good Thief) and it's the second time he's used a McCabe novel as his source material. (Their 1997 collaboration, The Butcher Boy, won the Silver Bear for Best Direction at the Berlin Film Festival.) Like The Crying Game which also placed a transgendered individual at its heart, Pluto's protagonist becomes inadvertently embroiled in IRA tactics and politics. Yet, in typical Jordan fashion, politics and plot are once again incidental to the love the Irish director engenders in his characters. And it wasn't until the screening that Murphy fully appreciated what Jordan was doing with Kitten.

"When I watched it last night, I realized that transvestism isn't part of the movie. It's actually an ancillary, peripheral part of the story. It happens incrementally through the course of the movie, and eventually we see Kitten in full regalia. But she doesn't do it to make a statement. She does it because she feels it. It's not about 'Look at me!' It's about 'I need to do this; this is the way I need to express myself; this is who I am.' It's the same way certain people want to grow their hair, or wear a beard, you know?"

Yet there's little escaping Jordan's fascination with individual identity—as a metaphor for collective, mutating cultural identify. The parish priest (Liam Neeson), Bertie the magician (Stephen Rea), the posh pimp in a Mercedes (Bryan Ferry), the decampment to London, and even Van Morrison's "Madame George" and "Cyprus Avenue" inform this identity at every step of this Candide-esque fable about an orphaned child looking for its mother. Carpe diem.