Watch Breath For Free

Very best movie i ever watch

Just perfect...

It's a good bad... and worth a popcorn matinée. While it's easy to lament what could have been...

Blistering performances.

In the old silent movies, captions were needed even as the actors did their best to convey emotions, often (by today's standards) way overdoing it. The actors in "Breath" skillfully convey practically all we need to know about what is going on in their internal lives, without dialogue. There is, in fact dialogue--not a lot, just exactly enough. This is a daring and brilliant film, and, sorry to say, one that doesn't seem to appeal to many people. I find the film quite transparent, but reviewers seem stymied by the odd situation (a woman in a broken marriage goes to visit a stranger on death row to offer him comfort). What is so difficult about this? She feels as if she is dying so she reaches out to someone else who is dying, even before his sentence is carried out. DUH. How she reaches out is quirky; not for a moment did my attention flag. The relationship motif is enhanced by what transpires in the prison cell of the condemned man, which he shares with three other men, one of whom is in love with him. This is not a film for those who want everything laid out for them so that they don't have to participate in elucidating the meaning. However, for those who are willing to put together the few pieces of the puzzle in this spare and gorgeous film, the effort will be rewarding. I found the film deeply touching, painful, beautiful, and haunting.

It's no secret that I have little affection with Korean cinema. It's just not my cup of tea. But among the rubble of popular Korean cinema there's a true cineast pumping out brilliant cinema at a dazzling rate. Kim Ki-duk is a regular art-house favorite and rightfully so. This weekend I had the pleasure of watching his latest effort on the big screen. screen cap from breathSo far, I've seen all of Ki-duk's films. Over the years he's made little changes to his success formula, only visually his films have become a lot more mature. Breath continues this tradition, ignoring the little misstep of his previous film Shi Gan. Ki-duk reaches back to his "quiet cinema" and with success.Breath has it all. Troubled characters, little dialog, rough around the edges and strange happenings. But underneath that barren surface lies a more subtle, warm interior. Not exactly new, but it's the first time Ki-duk plays with this emotion so openly and the change of heart is notable throughout the film.At its core, Breath tells the story of four broken characters. No director that is more able to create a setup where unlikeable characters can win the sympathy of an audience. Because not a single one of the characters in Breath is free from sin. The prisoner killed his wife and kid, his fellow prisoner hurts him because he can't express his love, the mother cheats on her husband with the prisoner and the husband mistreats his own wife and has a flirt on the side. And thus starts a story of a love between four people.Ki-duk brings his characters alive with rather unknown actor, though they are really some of the best modern Asian cinema has to offer. Especially Chen Chang bring a lot to this film, adding yet another strong film to his impressive list of acting jobs. Chang's wife is also very strong in her role, hardly speaking but playing her emotions instead of telling them. Class-A stuff. screen cap from breathVisually, Ki-duk is still improving with each film. While his earlier films were too unfinished to be considered visually impressive, his newer work has this delicate touch that enters every shot. Ki-duk's timing is also improving, and his eye for interesting compositions is still functioning rather well. The film is never absolutely stunning but the quiet, subtle images bear well with the rest. He matches his visuals with a soundtrack that enhances this delicate feeling.As an interesting surprise, Ki-duk inserts several musical intermezzos. He also revives his seasonal structure and couples a song to each season. The happy mood coming from those scenes is in sharp contrast with the actual feelings of the characters. A nice addition that reliefs, but at the same time hurts just as much.I guess Breath is a little more playful than his previous films overall. There's of course Ki-duk himself playing director behind his screen in prison. It's an interesting extra layer that made me smile when I noticed it. And it leads to a strong scene where he cuts from the love scene in prison to the father and kid playing outside in the snow. I also liked the "acted" musical intermezzos, which add a second level of acting. Beautiful scenes with very contrasting feelings.Breath is a strong entry in Ki-duk's ever growing list of films, positioning itself among his best work. While progress between his films is slow and his work hardly brings anything new to the table, his unique position in the world of cinema makes this of little importance. He keeps improving himself and Breath illustrates this well. Awesome film, not really my preferred kind of cinema and because of that all the better for making me love this film and its characters. 4.5*/5.0*

Of the limited number of Korean auteur Kim Ki-duk's movies, I have only seen a handful of them, and mostly they are the relatively contemporary movies, like The Bow, 3-Iron and Time. The feeling I got from them all is consistent - that it's not your usual storytelling, as he seemed more often than not to obscure any intended message, or meaning in his tales, much like searching for an Easter Egg, or worse, that needle in the haystack to get something out of it. If I can summarize his movies in a statement, then it'll be to expect something that's totally unexpected, though not necessary always in a good way.The main draw here for his 14th film, Breath, is Taiwanese actor Chang Chen. I was curious how Kim would be directing him in one of his movies, and as it turned out, because of the obvious language barrier, it's a convenient cop out to have his death row inmate Jang Jin (even his character's name bears semblance to his own) made a suicide manic, choosing to maim his voicebox so that there isn't a necessity to speak at all. Why he's in jail we're not sure, and in true Kim Ki-duk style, his inmate buddies who share the same cell, are not your ordinary gangster looking characters with big tattoos. While two of them are quite bland, there's an effeminate inmate who has a liking for Jang Jin, but gets time and again brushed aside when he demonstrates and emotes jealousy.Housewife Yeon (played by Park Ji-ah) discovers that her husband is cheating on her, and given the media attention on Jang Jin and his suicide attempts incessantly hitting the news, she decides to get back at her husband by striking a relationship with him, posing as an ex-girlfriend, and finding therapy in Uncle Jang. But before you say "boring", what made her character a little bit impossible to believe is the lengths she'll go to just to spice up the visitor's session according to seasons, and of course, add some colour, life and song to a meandering dull movie. She does impossible feats of wallpapering, which I thought would be more credible it they weren't so well done.For half the movie, we see a one way street between Yeon and Jang Jin, she finding an outlet to vent her frustrations, while he finding it amusing to have a total stranger bring forth some fresh air, though artificial, injected into his imprisoned four walls. While there are of course issues of morality here that could be made for points of discussion, by the time the ending rolls around, these are indeed tossed out the window in double quick time. I suspect that 90% of the 10 members of the audience were here because of the tantalizing poster of Chang Chen's mouth on boob (the film has an M18 rating by the way), and it's not rocket science that the ah-peks were probably here for only one thing.But alas, that, it doesn't deliver, but what it does cement very surely, is that you'll never know what to expect from a Kim Ki-duk film, who becomes his own voyeur as he spies on the duo from the CCTV Cameras fed back to the confines of his security office. Unfortunately, Breath turns out to be a time waster, and you'll find yourself cheering at any moment that could have possibly breathed life into a dull movie. Perhaps art movie lovers out there could find some meaning if they look hard enough, but here, I'm calling out that the Emperor is naked.

In commenting on Kim's (that is his surname) movies, I am aware of my limitation of not having seen "Spring, summer, fall, winter….and spring" (2003) which purported is his best film. "Samaria" (2004) I really like, seeing it as a depiction of polarization (in more ways than one) as well as a touching father-and-daughter story. "Bin-jip" (2004), unfortunately, I cannot bring myself to join the general chorus to praise. If found it unconvincing and shallow, "4 clever ideas adding up to a prank" as I put in my summary line."Breath" (or "Soom") I found to be a distant cousin of "Bin-jip" although more serious and less haphazard. Like any of Kim's movies, "Breath" has things enigmatic that seem to require explanation. But Kim is a director that had openly declared that he won't bother explaining his movies. Indeed, explanations are not even required.Shot with imaginative camera work and Kim's usual attention to details, this movie tells the story of how a woman whose marriage is on the rocks starts visiting a prisoner on death roll and gradually develops a subtle relationship with him. Her family life is however not entirely unbearable. Although it is unfortunate that her husband has an affair, he is not depicted as a particularly despicable character. He genuinely cares about their pre-teen daughter and reacts with restrained sense when he discovers his wife's strange routine. He even drives her to the prison on her final visit.The prisoner's story is grimmer. We are told that he is on death roll for murdering his own wife and children. He hardly ever speaks, his lifeless eyes seem always indicate a trance and his attempted suicide has led to advancing of his execution date. One of the three prisoners in the same cell, a young man (who doesn't speak either), harbors homosexual desires for him and becomes obviously jealous as the situation progresses.The audience, depending on the POV they place themselves, can see many different things in this movie: a threatened marriage salvaged by some bazaar action, absolution and reconciliation, unpredictable ways a relationship between two individuals can develop, mental anguish of a prisoner on death roll, absurdities in a prison cell – these are among the more obvious. Talking about POV, it is interesting to note that the key scenes that take place in the visiting cell are seen through the eyes of the security officer who monitors the close-circuit TV in the prison. We only see this character as a refection on the monitor. As director Kim's name in on the IMDb cast credit, I wonder if he is the one who plays this security officer. If it is indeed the case, is he consciously doing the M. Night Shyamalan thing?