Verdict
Summary
Very much a document of the very early ’80s music scene in London, Breaking Glass will work best for those already interested in the type of music it covers, which is punk / New Wave / alt rock in the style of Siouxsie and the Banshees, Kate Bush, or Gary Numan, and if you like that stuff, then this is a movie for you.
Plot:
A punk band rises to fame in London at the height of the New Wave movement.
Review:
Kate (Hazel O’Connor) is a struggling young punk / New Wave rocker living and surviving on dive bar gigs in London just as the New Wave / punk craze is about to hit the mainstream, but she’s going nowhere with a band that doesn’t have any passion or ambition. A guy named Danny (Phil Daniels) who catches her shows sees something in her, straight to her heart and soul and sees a star, but Danny himself is a virtual nobody, but swears he can make her a star if she’ll just make him her manager. With nothing to lose, she entertains him, and all of a sudden he’s setting up auditions for a completely new band, with her as the lead singer and songwriter. She quickly assembles a band that is actually as talented as she is (look for a young Jonathan Pryce as the saxophonist), and Danny is setting up respectable gigs for them. All of a sudden, they’ve got a two-year record deal, and their songs are on the radio. The band is called Breaking Glass, and Kate’s anarchy / change message hits the vein of a turbulent time, and they’ve got a message that connects with the youth (like a lot of bands in the early New Wave movement). When they’re at a festival with a bunch of other bands, a police raid and a riot happens, and a concert-goer (a teenager) is killed, and someone takes a photo of Kate next to the dying young man, and just like that, she becomes the face and the image of the incident, which puts her further at the forefront of the movement, but it also sends her into a depression and a funk. With her ideals and her image now in the spotlight of the media, will Breaking Glass survive the times, or just be a flash in the pan?
Very much a document of the very early ’80s music scene in London, Breaking Glass will work best for those already interested in the type of music it covers, which is punk / New Wave / alt rock in the style of Siouxsie and the Banshees, Kate Bush, or Gary Numan, and if you like that stuff, then this is a movie for you. It’s fiction, but it might as well be a docudrama about Hazel O’Connor’s music and persona, as she wrote and performed 13 original songs for this film. It doesn’t fall into the trappings of drugs / relationship drama (although there is a little of that, but it’s not the centerpiece), and it has a lot of energy and style. Brian Gibson (who later did the Tina Turner biopic What’s Love Got to Do With It) directed it.
Fun City Editions brings Breaking Glass to Blu-ray for the first time, and the disc is presented in sparkling high definition. The longer, UK cut is offered for the first time to North America, and the special features, including a new video essay, a new video interview with one of the producers, a new audio commentary with a film historian, and an alternate scene, are all stellar.
