Neil Jordan and novelist Pat McCabe reunite for the incongruously lipsticked odyssey of Patrick ‘Kitten’ Braden (Cillian Murphy, impressive and impossibly pretty), a border town transvestite Pollyanna stuck in the oppressive sepia of the grubby '70s. With the ‘Troubles’ bubbling tragically in the background, Kitten escapes to London in search of the mother who abandoned him but somehow contrives to find even more strife. Drifting into various terrible lines of employment – dressing in a Womble suit alongside a belligerent Brendan Gleeson (brilliant as ever) and assisting Stephen Rea’s utterly creepy magician – Kitten winds up in the sex industry and on the wrong side of the authorities.
Still, if you can survive wearingly wrongly gendered clothing in pre-enlightened Ireland, you can probably survive anything. Regardless of grim circumstance, the fabulous protagonist’s diehard romanticised worldview transcends and transforms the ickiest stuff that life can throw at him. In Mr. Jordan’s film, Kitten’s travails play like a glamorised triumph of the will, refashioning the world and even South Ulster into a more tolerant and tolerable place – a fairytale that prefigures the civilising benefits of modernity to come.
While Breakfast On Pluto necessarily lacks the savagery that made The Butcher Boy so compelling, it’s a fantastic journey nonetheless.