Breathe In

I haven’t seen dIrector Drake Doremus’s previous film, Like Crazy, but I take that as it is about a British college student studying at an L.A. university and this film is about a British college student studying at a New York university that is safe to say that he and his co-writer on both films, Ben York Jones, saw some extra miles to be had from it. Whereas that film dealt with a romance between peers, Breathe In deals with the relationship between a young woman (played by Felicity Jones in both films) and an older man (Guy Pearce).

Jones plays Sophie, an 18-year-old English exchange student who arrives to stay at the home of upstate New York music teacher, Keith (Guy Pearce), his cookie-jar collecting wife, Megan (Amy Ryan) and their girlie-ish 18-year old daughter (Mackenzie Davis).  Keith is already in the throes of a mid-life crisis, pining for his bohemian youth, so the fact that Sophie is a brilliant pianist and looks damn fine in a bikini is quite enough to throw him completely off his perch. Nothing wrong there but where a lot of people are going to quibble is that Sophie reciprocates, indeed struggles with her attraction to Keith (Sophie presumably has a thing for older men  as she conveniently explains that she was brought up by her single father initially and later by her aunt and uncle and that she was very close to the latter until he died).

Unfortunately Doremus doesn't allow the relationship to evolve organically and from the get-go there is such a pall of anticipation over Sophie that you suspect that she must be harbouring some dark secret like an intention to murder the family in their beds. In this respect the progression into a full-blown folie-à-deux is both unconvincing and somewhat of a disappointment.

Although some may find the fly-on-the wall camera work and seemingly extemporized dialogue actually working against the desired naturalism, ironically, giving the film a rather contrived feel, Breathe In works quite well as a cautionary tale thanks to Guy Pearce’s performance but even more so as a melancholy depiction of the loneliness of the human heart.

 

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