Crossing Jordan

As Neil Jordan remembers it, 1970s Dublin was a peacock’s parade of clashing wardrobes. “You had a very schizophrenic combination of elements on the streets,” the Irish writer-director recalls in a genial baritone, “guys in tank tops and flares and platform heels like a Regency costume, while at the same time you had guys in combat boots and dark glasses holding placards. Popular culture was saying one thing to you, while political signals were conveying something very different.” In that sense, Jordan says, he found Patrick McCabe’s novel Breakfast on Pluto “a very accurate reflection of the zeitgeist at the time.” The book tells the story of Patrick “Kitten” Braeden, an androgyne whose picaresque journey through war-torn Ireland is the stuff of gossips’ dreams. In Jordan’s movie version, which opened last week in Nashville, the gossips are computer-animated robins who convey tawdry bits of information in subtitled chirps—a fanciful touch typical of the movie’s flights of whimsy. Yet it’s in keeping with the hero’s ability to transcend the violence around him through sheer frivolity. As he did in The Crying Game, Jordan uses transvestism as a counterpoint to Ireland’s long, bloody war over its identity. The story’s appeal, he explains, “had to do with the idea of disguise—taking on a persona that allowed you to be more yourself than you were allowed to be, if that makes sense. It could just as well have been the story of a young man named Patrick Braeden who imagined he was a Buddhist monk.” Despite its gender-bending hero, the film does not dwell in the physical realm of desire or sexuality. That gives the movie an oddly unresolved tone, but Jordan likes its sweetness. “I loved [Kitten’s] innocence,” he maintains, “the fact that he had no problems whatsoever with his emotional identity and his sexuality and his loving other men. And I loved that the film wasn’t about him coming to terms with himself in that way.” Asked about the perennial topic of the Troubles, and hopes for resolution, the director somewhat demurs. “I don’t know what I’ve got to say about modern Ireland because maybe I’m not part of it,” Neil Jordan says. “Conflict and badness are easier to write about than goodness and sameness, and the fact that Ireland is becoming a bit like Norway is odd.” With a deadpan flourish, he adds, “It’s confusing and soporific, and strangely happy.”