Breathing (movie review)

Breathing (drama) (2011) (1 hr 30 mins)

This Austrian film written and directed by first-time film-maker Karl Markovics is a very assured debut. It reminded me of films like The Son by Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne in its understated approach and its depiction of ordinary routines that gradually reveal deeper emotions felt by the main characters.

The film tells the story of Roman Kogler (played by Thomas Schubert), a young man at a youth detention centre on the outskirts of Vienna, awaiting parole after serving time for killing a man. He’s uncommunicative and sullen, appears to have no family or friends and faces the prospect of a bleak future. To improve his chances of parole, he’s urged to show he can hold down a job. He chooses work experience at a morgue, collecting and transporting dead bodies. Perhaps he feels more of a connection with the dead than with the living.

 

One day a woman is brought to the morgue who shares his surname.  Kogler decides to track down his mother and find out why she surrendered him to the care of social services when he was a young child. Their meeting provides the emotional crux of the film.

The director apparently spent many weeks accompanying the morgue workers and attending a detention centre to research the script. The attention to detail pays off as the film has a very authentic feel throughout. It doesn’t offer any easy answers to Kogler’s plight but there are moments of hope: a friendly encounter with a young woman backpacker on the train; his work colleagues gradually accepting him as one of the team; and a stirring of remorse for his crime. The crime is never really explained but remains there as a shadow, a constant reminder of the personal demons he struggles with.

The director, an actor himself, extracts a wonderfully natural performance from Schubert in his very first acting role. Schubert manages to convey both Kogler’s detachment and his longing to connect, his toughness and his vulnerability.

There are poignant moments throughout the film: the humiliation of being strip-searched every time Kogler returns to the detention centre; Kogler and his work colleagues weighing one another up and not quite knowing what to make of the other; Kogler being shown by a work colleague how to tie his tie. There is a moving scene where Kogler and his colleagues go to collect a woman’s body in her home. Kogler sees the photographs and mementos decorating her room and telling of a family life and history that he has never had.

There is some inventive use of the camera: Kogler underwater seeing the legs of other boys as they dangle in the swimming pool; and the final scene as the camera rises above a graveyard and turns slowly to the majestic sky above. The title Breathing refers to Kogler’s solitary swimming sessions at the detention centre where he is learning how to breathe underwater, a symbol perhaps of a rebirth which Kogler may be undergoing as he edges towards some kind of future. This is a thoughtful, moving film that will stay with you afterwards.

 
Rating: 8/10