Breath is a virtually unmarketable coming-of-age film about two young teenage boys from Australia. Its first act is a fairly conventional, feel good surfing movie with some charming patois, oddball characters, lovely yarn-spinning, and pretty shots of beaches. The second act comes in like a bull into a sex shop to bust the genre. It challenges the patience and credibility of anyone who came for anything other than the brilliant and seething Elizabeth Debicki (of Cloverfield Paradox fame, Netflix’s big post-Superbowl troll, the gold woman no one cares about in Guardians of the Galaxy 2, and the wokest of woke Jordan Baker in the 2013 Gatsby adaptation). Third act is tense, poignant, and fleeting. Writer, director, and star, Simon Baker has made something unique that probably no one will watch.
As we were sitting in the empty Kahala theater, my dad and I tried to remember the last surfing movie we had seen (Point Break, 2015), which is just to say that we’re not very well-versed in surf films and the ones we have seen are pretty terrible. Later when I mentioned to Wife that the last Australian Indie film (Girl Asleep) we’d seen had some nice similarities, she tried to correct me, suggesting “Hunt for the Wilderpeople,” but refuses to acknowledge the essential difference between New Zealand and Australia. I think this is actually the third movie I’ve seen with my dad on this trip: I2 & Sicario 2, the other two.
Breath‘s love of textual allusion does not fall into the easy tropes of pseudo-philosophical hand-waving that some films do: Sando’s bookshelf cues up the literary world with which the film interacts, the copies of White Fang, Call of the Wild signaling the boys’ mentor’s spirited and fraught relationship with nature, the film adaptation of Moby Dick playing in the background over shots of the sea, the hunt on the lips of Ishmael, Pikelet’s dutiful reading of The Heart of Darkness. As far as I can tell, the movie doesn’t trip over itself to try to bridge the connections. Rather, the literary references form an aesthetic by which to interpret the action of the plot (maybe that’s a shallow, convoluted way of saying that the constant shots of Pikelet reading books doesn’t bother me.) Similarly, Breath is interested in internal symmetry and in the exploration of themes and motifs, especially its most versatile of metaphors: breath. (Not) Holding your breath. Short of. Breath play. Allusion, symmetry, and the theme of breath serve as powerful structural supports for the story without the formalism of chapter cards (Dunkirk, 2017) or lengthy quotation (Pulp Fiction, really any Tarantino film).
Aside from the structural artistry of Breath, the script features some pretty unforgettable language, as high diction–possibly from the book? (Wife queries)–mixes with charming Australian teenage slang. Even the characters’ names are beautiful, like a spell: Sando. Loonie. Pikelet. Eva. Queenie. The diction is a mix of patois and elevated language that soars into the literary at times, when we hear Moby Dick on the television, or the moments of poetry when Sando waxes philosophical with his “hippie shit”. That scattered quality of language is surprising. It cuts the youths to their core, exposes characters:
- “I never knew men could do something so beautiful. So pointless. And elegant.”
- “I thought I brought surfers, men above the ordinary.”
- “They kind of go together. Guru shit and bad manners.”
- Eva’s monologue to Pikelet in bed, “You always act like you’re going to lose something,” about loss and endings pairs nicely with Pikelet’s last words in the film’s final act about Loonie “[living] his life like he had nothing to lose, because he wasn’t worth anything. But he was worth something to me.”
On the flip side, Breath is skillful about its use of silence as well. Its sparing use of silence gestures at the common occurrence of inarticulation in childhood, the ineffability of coming of age. Wife suggests, the arc of the story is Pikelet’s articulation of his fear and his acknowledgement that his own discomfort doesn’t make him weak or bad. The film is neutral about this bit of self-discovery on his part–it doesn’t turn anything upsidedown, doesn’t make Sando into a bad guy or any less of a role model. The stakes are high because emotion matters, which is a sentiment that Wife brought up also when talking about Brooklyn (2015) for the first time.
Briefly, some of the most challenging aspects of the film can be summed up in three words: “Eva’s second act.” I don’t mean “challenging” in a puritanical sense. I mean, if we are going to engage with possible weaknesses in storytelling or major avenues for inquiry about characters, this is where the edges of the wrapping paper of Breath start to come open first. My take is the less constructive and Wife ran the apologetics really well so I’ll give her the floor in a second. When I watched, I resorted to thinking of Eva’s character as basically Claire Vaye Watkins’s girls watching boys do stuff. No one bothered to write a complex female character but they acknowledged the importance of the older female in the coming-of-age story for young men, and suddenly Eva appears. The bit in the second act with Eva and Pikelet felt like wish fulfillment to me, more than anything else. Squints faking dead to get the kiss from the life guard at the pool-type hijinks. Not worth going into Flower or Blame-type ethical consideration. More interesting, I think are the questions that Wife opened up about the ambiguity of dynamics among Eva, Pikelet, and Sando in the second act.
Wife is interested in the way in which the film tightens focus on Eva’s psychology and motivation in the second act after seeming to throw her out as the bitchy eye-candy in the first act. Question 1) Does Sando know or not?
“Why do you let him go?” “Because I know what he needs.” “What about what you need?” “He knows what I need,” she says while looking at Pikelet.
When Loonie returns from the trip and gives Pikelet his report on the front steps, he alludes to gossip he’s heard Sando talk about and insists that Sando wants to see him soon. When Sando talks about the trip with Pikelet the next day, he says that Loonie was a handful, but what Loonie represents (possibly) as jealousy or anger is absent. Instead, he seems gracious and also maybe a little bit guilty that he’s left the future mother of his child behind while surfing Indonesia: “I think you already know” is not menacing so much as sheepish, humble. Is it more than that?
Question 2) When Eva tells Pikelet his question is “absurd,” does she say that it’s absurd because it couldn’t possibly be the case or because it only could be the case? The passage of time is so well hidden that it’s hard to tell if it’s being compressed or stretched in the second act once Sando and Loonie leave for vacation. Is the bike montage a matter of successive days or is it weeks or… a mix of both? It feels like days, but it’s hard to be sure.
Fatherhood in Breath is complex. Pikelet’s relationship with his father is subtle. We see him fishing at first, part of a tradition, Pikelet asking if his father thinks they could manage to row the boat out to the open ocean. The first time the boys get back from surfing, Mr. Pike ignores Loonie’s broken bike and tells Pikelet to go inside and apologize to his mother before doing his chores. Mr Pike suggests they go fishing and Pikelet turns him down to go on their surprise trip to Barney’s (which is potentially dangerous). Their whole discovery of surfing is taboo in the first place, we learn, as they bike down to the beach in one of the early scenes, because Mr Pike has forbidden them from going to the beach after having heard that someone died in the water, Loonie explains to his friend. Instead of a big blowout over Pikelet’s new relationship with a friendly stranger with a van and Pikelet’s newfound adrenaline junket, Pikelet turns his father down at dinner. Mr Pike puts his utensils down for a moment and Pikelet does the same and then asks to be excused. Mr Pike’s distress is understated. He comes off as apprehensive and trusting. There’s no scolding or warning from the parents. When Pikelet finds out he’s been abandoned by his best friend and his mentor (“coach”) for Indonesia, he sits on the front steps despondent and his father approaches him. Cut scene to them on their rowboat, fishing the inlet. Pikelet comes back to the car to thank his dad for driving him to and from the Social. Sando tells Pikelet, I think, not to show his old man the new surfboard at the end. Pikelet watches his parents gardening, rather than go out to surf the nautilus.
For Loonie, the cricket shiner is not, and the broken arm is a fall down the pub stairs, helped by his father. Both serve as a nice justification for his dropping out of school to surf in Thailand. It’s complicated by the fact that the father appears to supply them with the wherewithal to purchase their first real surfboards through chores. Loonie’s father is an inconsistent force in Loonie’s pursuit of a passion.
The story weaves complex dynamics between characters, but it also features scenes that feel preciously sheltered from the emotion of family and romantic relationships. Scenes of pure beauty: the trek to and day at Barney’s, the bus accident on the way to school. The lack of reference to these experiences feels like part of the magic of the film. As if Sando’s pronouncement, “You don’t need a photo,” is enacted on film, compartmentalizing their lives, and cordoning feelings of trauma and grief off from one another. These undiscussed, unexamined scenes float on the surface of Pikelet’s character, building the tension and deepening and enriching our understanding of his actions when they turn toward the unexpected.
I’ve struggled with Breath for long enough today. It’s lovely to see a movie that explores questions of teenage sexuality in such honest, unembellished ways, but the chief way in which it is explored feels a little artificial and fantastical. I don’t know if that element of fantasy gets in the way of what Baker is trying to do, but it will certainly set a natural limit on the audiences who are willing to give this movie a fair shake. Breath is something special this summer, difficult to pin down, daring, if not entirely progressive, and very pretty.
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