Breakfast On Pluto

- How much is that doggy in the window.. The one with the... is it waggedy or waggly Charlie?
- Waggly.. no wait a minute..
- Oh father?
- Yes?
- You know the doggy with the tail? Is it waggly or waggedy?
- The song?... Waggedy, I seem to remember, your mother never stopped singing it..


In the fictional Irish town of Tyrellin, in 1960's, a woman abandons her baby in the doorstep of the father. Being a priest, the father leaves his illegitimate son to an unloving foster mother, hence, Patrick the orphan starts his life with lack of love and goes on a continuous search for it. While growing up, he shows bizarre behaviours such as getting dressed as a woman with his foster mother's clothes, and when he comes to the age of his late teens, it is seen that it is half way passed to his transgender future with permed hair, platforms and make-up, as well as his behaviours and his name now changed to Patricia; when the conservative town can not take any more of him and he certainly is fed up with them, he leaves home, to find his mother now living in London. On his way, he would love, suffer, have bizarre encounters with bizarre men and become Patricia "Kitten" Braden; and he would find the love he has been looking for, in his father.



Breakfast On Pluto is a 2005 movie by Neil Jordan, based on the novel of the same name by Patrick McCabe. It is a dark comedy; you laugh all the way throughout the movie, however it does leave a certain depressing taste in the end for it is a sad story of a long search for love and acceptance. One interesting point of the movie is that it does not show an extreme brutal reaction against Patricia; it is certain that he is not accepted by a conservative town as he is, however Jordan has decided to show it through Patricia's emotional journey, rather than graphic and disturbing details, thus, he touches your heart in a deeper way.

Behind the story of Patricia on the front, the movie also gives insight to the political conflicts and struggles of the era and the actions carried out by IRA. It is not a sub story that is completely apart from that of Patricia's, for he is an Irish and even though he prefers to stay away from that serious world, it gets to him, when he loses one of his best friends in an explosion, when his first love happens to provide IRA with loads of guns, or when he himself gets hurt in a bombing, resulting in a false accusation, because of being an Irish in the scene (even, a transgender Irish to-be-exact).

You should join Kitten in his journey; it is a rather long one of 130 minutes, but hey, you do not meet such a glamour in your everyday life, do you?