Anne-Sophie Brasme was just 16 years old when she wrote her first novel “Breathe”. Melanie Laurent also made her feature-film debut (as actress) at the age of 16. When the multi-faceted French actress read the novel, who studied film-making in school, wanted to turn into a movie. After making couple of shorts and a feature film (“The Adopted”), Melanie has adapted “Breathe” aka "Respire" (2014) with a highly refined sense of direction, while at the same time burrows the torment of a 17 year old girl deep underneath our skin. Brasme’s novel, when released, was termed as a ‘Young Adult’ novel. However, it differs so much from the YA template that it becomes a universal story of friendship between two people, who had never experienced real love in their lives.
Teen friendships can either give you nurturing or strangling
experience and it’s hard to tell which way it is headed. “Breathe” tackles the
hormonal-driven closeness of two 17 year old girls, Charlene aka Charlie
(Josphene Japy) and Sarah (Lou de Laage). The film opens with Charlie getting
up from her bed, hearing the enraged voice of her mother talking with absentee,
abusive father. Charlie sits at the dining table and dips her face into the
bowl of brewed coffee to obscure her feelings. Her dad offers her to drive to
school, but she rejects and walks alone wearing a mask of melancholia. Charlie’s
loyal friend is Victoire, who often bickers about boys. In comes Sarah, a natural
beauty, whose mother works for a NGO in Nigeria. Charlie is immediately drawn to this girl, who
exudes confidence and excitement like none of her classmates.
Sarah is tired of her cackling aunt with whom she lives and
her absentee mother. She needs a sense of stability, while Charlie wants to
experience free-spirit and fun, which they both can give to one another. An
instant emotional bond is formed and later Sarah tags along for Charlie’s
family vacation to seashore. The girls’ emotional bond strengthens and then gradually
weakens during the vacation. Sarah seems to be the girl who can never emotionally
invest herself onto somebody for a long time. Charlie is just the opposite in
this: she is the girl who gets obsessed over a firm emotional connection. In an
earlier scene, a teacher says ‘passion’ is something that emerges from the gut.
The shared passion that made possible the friendship between these two girls
eventually turns into torment, which figuratively delivers a strong punch at
Charlie’s guts.
Sarah got to be one of the most familiar figures in movie
history. The way she pouts her full lips; the manner with which she sexily
sways to the disco song; that studied casualness; that rock ‘n’ roll attitude.
So, it’s pretty easy to predict that Charlie is going to be seduced and witness
anguish through Sarah. But, still there is something intense in the way Melanie
Laurent has unwounded the script (co-written with Julien Lambroschini) that
keeps on creating incisive, detail layers about the characters. The layers are
stacked up so elegantly that the script at no point displays YA novel
sensibilities. Laurent transcends the ‘Mean Girls’ territory and draws us to
ponder over the roots of the obsession and animosity that plagues these girls. “Breathe”
could simply be considered as a treatise on damaged single mothers. The dysfunctional
bearings of the older women and their existential vacuum are what reverberated
throughout the movie in the girls’ actions. Laurent and Julien aren’t just
saying “Oh yes! women can be cruel to each other too”. Beneath that statement,
we are also left to contemplate over how women are trained (or should I say
forced) to possess undiminished source of empathy and forgiveness (the battered
mother-daughter duo’s actions reflect this theme).
Insecure feeling, the most common fearful aspect of adolescence,
is the main theme of the narrative. One girl refuses to act on her emotions,
while the other acts upon every emotion that comes upon her mind so as to
fulfill that yearning for acceptance. Insecurity plays a vital role on both
their polar opposite behavior. The students’ drinking, drug intakes and aroused
rocking of hips become a symbol for that insecurity. That feeling, however, isn’t
confined to these adolescent people. The adults in the film feel that too and
they indirectly seem to advice their young ones to drink or dance away one’s
problems. Although the viewers might choose to villain to hate, the script addresses
the question of Charlie’s treatment of her previous BFF Victoire. The shocking
end also asks us whether Charlie need to have put up with so much of the
ill-treatment that eventually drained her of kindness.
“Breathe” even with a robust script couldn’t have delivered
that gut punch, if not for the deft directorial touch of Melanie. The naked
emotional truth the director displays is as honest as what we witnessed in
Abdellatif Kechiche’s “Blue is the Warmest Color” (a film whose low-key charms
are overlooked due to that infamous long sex scenes). There are hints to
Charlie’s need for physical closeness with Sarah, but it is an aspect that’s
never treated in a trite manner (Melanie treats it as a propagation of Charlie’s
passion towards Sarah). May be under the hands of another director, “Breathe”
could have become a full-blown sexual relationship movie. As a viewer, we are
meant to take Charlie’s side and hate Sarah, but the director shows
wholehearted compassion even for the manipulative assailant. For example, look
at the way the film-maker has staged the scene when Charlie takes a look into
the false, precarious life of Sarah. Laurent employs a smart tracking shot to
put us on Charlie’s point of view in order to perfectly extract the empathy of ours
on Sarah’s life. So, when Sarah threatens & bullies Charlie for learning
the truth, the emotional brunt falls on us too.
Director Melanie has an excellent eye for shot compositions.
Along with cinematographer Arnaud Potier, she creates a barrage of visually communicative
shots. When the split starts between the girls, there is a wide shot (first one
in the film I think) of Charlie standing alone amidst a sea, symbolizing the sea
of afflictions she is about to encounter; when the bullying reaches a threshold
point, there is a shot of Charlie watching the sunset, reeling in the impending
doom; and there is also a shot of grey bare-branched tree reflecting on the
glass pane through which Charlie watches Sarah. The brief shot is composed in a
way that indicates the brink of her emotional fissures. It’s these little,
subtle shots that sustains the gritty atmosphere throughout the end. Of course,
all this directorial and writing excellence wouldn’t have survived, if not for
that anchored presence (not just performance) of Japy and Lou de Laage. Japy’s
passive blankness and Lou’s terrifying volatility are hard to forget.
“Breathe” aka “Respire” (90 minutes) is one of the best
sensitive, unsentimental films to showcase the fragility of adolescent
friendship.
Trailer
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