Breakfast On Pluto

At once a warm-hearted romp through the growing pains of Patrick ("Kitten"), a young transvestite, played out against a backdrop of IRA violence, and a serious contribution to understanding gender identity, Breakfast On Pluto goes further and allows us to look at the ways each of us develops a persona to enable our fragile inner world to interact with a sometimes less-than-forgiving society. It also provides hilariously wacky touches, such as milk-stealing robins, whose chirrups are subtitled for our edification, and the gradual oscillation between Kitten's hysterically funny debacles and asides and the more serious undercurrents that stimulate laughter and serious reflection.

Having breakfast on Pluto is the culmination of Kitten's idea of perfect romance, poeticised through a life of lyricism, in which the world persistently fails to come up to her inner vision. Although not all cross-dressers are transgendered, Patrick definitely wants to be a woman, swept off her feet by a strong man, soothing his worries, being a homemaker. Abandoned at birth, later adopted, suffering short shrift in the staunch Catholic community, he eventually leaves Ireland to seek his real mother, who has been "eaten up" by London - a journey that will have an unexpected and strangely fulfilling conclusion.

For most of the film, the bitingly humorous dialogue even extends to life-threatening situations. When Kitten is about to be executed by the IRA, she turns the tables on her assassins, berating them for arguing about who is to kill her, eventually pleading for just one bullet that they "can't even spare between them" and the killers leave nonplussed, making excuses about how it's not worth the bother. Later, interrogated and viciously beaten by police, she seems almost to be "falling in love" with her attacker in between blows, playing the devoted "partner", and when the police decide they have made a mistake and forcibly eject her, begs to be allowed to remain in jail so that she can clean and be a model prisoner for them.

We have spent so much time laughing that the impact is enhanced when we slowly realise that if Kitten (by her own admission) didn't spend so much time being droll, she would have to cry continuously. Stepping back a moment to see how awful her life has become, we see her as a very tough human being. Her emotional attachment to finding her mother is parodied in scenes in which a stage hypnotist gets her to believe that members of the audience and finally an inanimate object are her "mother."

Eventually we connect with the real person beneath the colourful persona and see the inner radiance that has been so stymied. It even takes some of the other characters in the film beyond their stereotype prejudices.

The final result is breathtaking.