Breathe In

A Film review of 'Breathe In'.

The former Sundance Festival winner Drake Doremus gives us ‘Breathe In’ - a truly honest portrayal of deep, inconvenient love. It crosses the boundaries of age and conformity to achieve a level of purity and unrivalled, raw, emotional intensity I’ve never seen before. The story follows an English girl (Felicity Jones) who comes to study in America to escape her grief.  She stays with an incredibly close family and despite her resistance slowly falls in love with the father (Guy Pearce), a piano teacher tainted by his unfulfilled ambition. 

It is shot in a simplistic manner, with a subdued colour palette and a gentle focus on exquisite detail from an abandoned swing at dusk to a particularly poignant book title. Watching this film was an agonizing experience in itself, I was consistently moved by the powerful sense of longing communicated by stolen glances between the physically detached - yet emotionally entwined - lovers. There are no sex scenes and barely any kissing, but my god you feel like the forbidden lovers have broken every rule imaginable. 

The hauntingly beautiful classical soundtrack (especially the track 'Steep Hills of Vicodin Tears') drew me further into the paradox of their euphoria turned to suffering. The crescendo leading up to the expectant silence of the intimate reservoir scene left us with a feeling of humbling emptiness when everything crumbled into loss. As 'Breathe In' draws to a close the father closes the lid of his piano and therefore gives up on any sense of wonder in his life and tragically our hearts sink with his. If you want to be moved, if you want to risk having your perspective on love and its boundaries dramatically altered, give this contemporary masterpiece a chance.