Accessibility Tools

  • Content scaling 100%
  • Font size 100%
  • Line height 100%
  • Letter spacing 100%

Breath ★★★★

by
ABR Arts 01 May 2018

Breath ★★★★

by
ABR Arts 01 May 2018

In Simon Baker’s film, there is a visually stunning moment – one among many – of a giant curving wave on the verge of breaking that recalls the Japanese artist Hokusai’s famous ‘The Great Wave of Kanagawa’. What these two images share is the sense of rapturous beauty that doesn’t underestimate the challenge it offers. It seems appropriate to start on this note as the cinematography (the work of Marden Dean and Rick Rifici) creates from the outset the centrality of the surf to the film, as indeed it is in Tim Winton’s 2008 novel.

Winton has in recent years been well served in the matter of his novels’ being adapted to the screen. The television miniseries Cloudstreet (2011) captured the novel’s poetic dealings with the possibility of reconciliation between contrasting approaches to living, and the three-hour Turning (2013), for which Winton co-authored the screenplay, miraculously wove seventeen of his short stories of interlocking lives into a coherent panorama – or mosaic? – of turning points and convergences in a coastal community. In Breath, his voice is heard on the soundtrack as that of Bruce Pike (‘Pikelet’), a mature version of the film’s youthful protagonist, drawing on the novel’s perceptions, as he intones: ‘Never had I seen something so beautiful, so pointless and elegant, as if dancing on water was the best thing a man could do.’

Leave a comment

If you are an ABR subscriber, you will need to sign in to post a comment.

If you have forgotten your sign in details, or if you receive an error message when trying to submit your comment, please email your comment (and the name of the article to which it relates) to ABR Comments. We will review your comment and, subject to approval, we will post it under your name.

Please note that all comments must be approved by ABR and comply with our Terms & Conditions.