Breakfast director Neil Jordan (R) chats up the NYFF press with co-producer Alan Moloney (Photo: STV)

I have neither the time nor the inclination to get into a big critical analysis of Neil Jordan's Breakfast on Pluto, which screens this weekend at the New York Film Festival. However, after viewing the film today, I left the theater wondering how a movie ostensibly about a transvestite in search of his mother could be the most resolutely political film of Jordan's career.

After all, this is the guy who directed the cutting dramas Angel (AKA Danny Boy in its US release), Michael Collins and, of course, The Crying Game, all of which take political passion and violence to varying extremes. The End of the Affair evaluated sexual and religious politics through novelist Graham Greene's twin conceits of war and mortality, while the class issues pervading Mona Lisa and The Butcher Boy underscore those films' themes of criminal reckoning and redemption.

In Breakfast on Pluto, however, Jordan's ambition bleeds into pop realms into which he had only peeked previously. Adapting Patrick McCabe's novel, Jordan casts the story of Patrick "Kitten" Braden through every political prism conceivable in 1970s Ireland: sex, class, family, friends and others that shuffled in the shadow of religion and geography. The Irish "Troubles" that haunt his most acclaimed work exist as both foreground and background here; Kitten's foray as a glam-rock groupie implodes with his cheeky defiance of the Irish Republican Army, while he and his childhood friends face loneliness and death as prisoners of the system.

That none of them can escape is the premise that makes Kitten's over-the-top androgyny such a respite—not only to himself, but also to those who cross his path and, ultimately, to Jordan and his audience.

"I've made a lot of movies over the last 20 years," Jordan told The Reeler after Friday's screening. "But there are those three movies (Angel, Collins, Crying Game) that dealt with the same issue a lot. The fact of the matter on this film was that the central character's perspective on those issues were so simple and so clear. And in the end, perhaps the only possible perspective to have is one without violence. Basically, while we're in life, why doesn't everybody kiss each other? Why don't we all wear beautiful clothes and make everything happier? Why don't we all embrace each other?

"I don't want to get emotional here, but that's where the perspective's gone over the last 20 years. It's that the Irish political issue has changed dramatically, and now I think it's almost over. It's kind of odd for me, and then to realize that perhaps the simplest kind of analysis you can make about those issues is probably the best of all."

Breakfast co-producer Alan Moloney agreed, raising the point that a "new generation" of progressive Irish filmmakers had emerged from decades of conflict. "I've gone through a period of film where we had been making stories about our past pretty consistently," he said. " 'Contemporary' film in Ireland is a very recent phenomenon, and in a way, I think this film is like a full stop or something. It really does exorcise those demons. In a way, I think Kitten is, in a lot of respects, kind of the conscience of the modern Irish audience. We're sick and tired of the violence, we're sick and tired of the fighting. It is fucking stupid. Let's throw the guns away and let's move on, you know?"

As such, Breakfast's central identity crisis represents Jordan's most evocative glimpse yet at the era's turbulent social imbalance. For better and/or worse, the filmmaker's demonstrable love of cinema has generally gotten the better of his ideology in the past: The Crying Game's deft, twisting mystery was as controversial as the film's tendency to humanize terrorists, while Michael Collins' ideology gambled (and lost) everything it had on the boxy conventions of the historical epic. Here, however, Jordan's camera clings close to the brilliant Cillian Murphy, whose Kitten lilts and purrs and glides through the kind of casual indignance that stuck with Malcolm McDowell's Alex in A Clockwork Orange.

Kitten's resilience, however, stems not from sociopathy but from security; faith in his sexuality and resistance to violence frees him to pursue the mother who supposedly abandoned him at the church steps years earlier. Aided by ace cinematographer Declan Quinn, Jordan and Murphy conflate strife with a sort of high camp, and their Ireland is a fury of colorful self-discovery on literally every front. Theirs is a world where priests visit peep shows, perfume is a weapon and Mitzi Gaynor symbolizes the elusive idyll of maternity. And while Breakfast's war flirts with emotional exploitation, its carnage establishes the film's excesses (digitized, subtitled birds perhaps being the most notable) as sort of gleefully ironic antidotes.

So I broke my promise about the analysis, but the even more important point is that as this year's festival Centerpiece, Breakfast on Pluto will screen in tandem with Jordan discussing it and the rest of his checkered career Saturday afternoon. I can think of worse ways to spend four hours—Little Manhattan opens this weekend, if you feel like you need some good old-fashioned Biblical scourging.