Last week,
I took a deep breath, bundled a mess of grief (following the loss of a loved
one) into the small parameters of a heart (always impossible to do) and
accepted a movie invitation to see Breath. I love the ocean. I love its wild
heart, the gentle or biting dance -depending on her mood, the layered spliced
up expanse of colour. I love it’s curling coo and call to slide one’s eyes over
salty arches and heady frothed up fun. I had wanted to see “Breath.” I love Tim
Winton’s way with words. I love descriptive tangled together and woven words
and he’s good at that. He’s worthy of labels such as “success” and “artistry”
though I’m not interested in such concepts around art usually. All of us are
artists in life. All of us capable of success. I hadn’t though, in this case,
read his book “Breath”.
Sitting in
a cinema, we breath the story together. A shame then, less people these days are
venturing forth from the comfort of Netflix on the couch to the lungs of
storytelling, to the place where sharing a yarn, is strangely possible between
the space of a picture show wall and an audience of expectant eyes. The screen
is flat (well in this case, no 3d glasses required) but the story is fuller,
rounder, closer and stratified by something intangible that immediately drew me
in, to begin with at least. To be honest I fell in and out of this film like
the tide, like a breath of willing life one minute and suffocating crankiness the
other.
There was
actually something beautiful about the film. The inversion of what is seen
above and below is both apparent in the sublime cinematography and in the
subtlety of the acting, the unsaid words, the uncluttered script, the stillness
and gentle pace. I was emotionally entangled in the beauty of the ocean scape.
It was so masterfully crafted, especially the bubbling underwater scenes
juxtaposed with the wild rollercoaster ride of a thrilling ocean, daring us to
take our breath away altogether. The scenery, the palate of this movie, not
muted but natural and real and organic, avoided a sickly sweet pathos of twee messages
and political correctness but it nevertheless did need some more truth. There
was something of a quentisential Australia there too. Having enjoyed year after
year of family holidays to a beachside country town, there was nostalgia for me
in this film. It’s a pity then there was never a girl in site on the beach, not
even swimming and certainly not surfing. I ached for that character to appear.
She didn’t even need to be good at surfing. She needed to be out in those ocean
scenes somehow though. She wasn’t.
The two
young men in this movie show a most commendable talent. We are compelled somehow
towards loving both of them despite some of their mistakes but we are also
compelled to wish for more in our young men too via what is left over at the
end of the film. The outcomes of their
lives and the influences that both propelled their learning to a deeper
awareness or suffocated their growth as human beings does not completely solve
issues around equality, because we are simply not quite there just yet.
It is a
movie about “manhood” but not “womanhood” yet it does have something to say
about women nevertheless. Some of it is a subversion of divisional stereotypes
and some of it simply serves further to reinforce them. For me, it is a
problematic movie for that reason.
Young
Queenie Cookson is clearly a character we are not supposed to like. I was disappointed
in this part of the story. We are supposed to find her, a young woman, less
interesting, flat, a little flaky, plain and emotionally indulgent. This is
contrasted with the elegant, older, mysterious and deeply troubled, Eva
disabled by an accident that cuts short her career as a professional ski
jumper. The portrayal of Queenie is handled very well but the character and
script here found me immediately dissociate from the film. Coupling a young
woman’s request for equal attention, steady loyalty and gentle building teenage
love with ideas around the ordinary and annoying is not the greatest message to
be pushing, especially where young women are concerned. Young Pikelet (Samson Coulter)
rejects Queenie in favour of his pull towards Eva who turns out to be a paedophilic
seductress who is possibly impregnated by Pikelet or Simon Baker’s character
Sando. We never really know at the movie’s conclusion who might be the father. Ratings
have certainly softened these days. in some cases, this is actually not such a
bad thing in other cases it is. Censorship can harbour some darkness in its own
right. With this particular film, the seriousness and complexity of the sexual
content is clearly not attended to that much. I found it difficult to marry
together the humorous device of Pikelet’s furious bike riding to “get laid” over
and over again with scenes around him being asked to engage Eva in asphyxiation
with a hot pink plastic bag during their sexual encounters. For me hot pink is
a vibrant colour, a choice, a matter of standing out, of mattering, of maturity
of woman hood, of love of brightness and promise. I also took exception to this
character’s presence on the screen. We also didn’t really like Eva that much.
We see Pikelet in his more naturally gentle response to life the victim of paedophilia.
He is visibly confused and disturbed by the manipulation. Again, there is no
sign of a female character that we can hold value in. It’s not so much that Eva
is there I suppose that there’s no other women we like at all for the duration
of the movie. It’s also yet another movie that puts a pity party around notions
of disability, for me I’m bored my such a motif in today’s more progressed world.
Granted she is a woman who is attracted to fear in the first place, she does
not shy away from a challenge but at the end of the day we are left with
something a bit flimsy in this character. Some of it is not her fault. Sando
expects “space” the ol’ sterotype that has women presented as the perpetraitors
of a henpecked hubby and in subverting her right to need more she seeks thrills
in young boys. In other words, Winton’s not actually representing a one
dimensional character in Eva. He’s not at all suggesting that it’s her fault.
The fault is in fact being laid down with the history of a past misogynistic
Australian landscape. It’s got some meat to it, this story, this movie. It’s
also got some flaws. Such is life.
I was taken
away on a boating holiday with the music, not one of those holidays where the
tacky trappings of having to look a certain way mean everything, a holiday for
the ears, for the heart, for the soul, for everything invisible that matters so
very much. It’s not too much about selling the bathing beauties of this world at
the cardboard checkout points but about the human heart. And isn’t it true that this film deals in
being able to say NO. Being able to say, this is not for me. I am not looking
for fear. I am not defined by the status quo. I don’t have to be wild or
reckless or brave to make a difference. It is a movie about the importance of
gentleness in boys that forgets a little bit about girls, but nevertheless does
make a difference in its own way by opening the path up for something of a new
way for everyone.
Butterfly Eyes 
