Breath (Kim Ki-duk, 2003)

(I have asthma, and so I know - not just theoretically - how essential air is, how, during attacks, your mind flails and flutters, and your lungs feel as if they're underwater, and reaching for that next breath is a sisyphean task until it is not. We saw Breath because Om, who stayed up for about half of the film, liked the DVD cover. I was mesmerized.)

Kita-kits sa basement ng Makati Med.

For the drowning, yes, there is always panic.

Or peace.
- Rickey Laurentiis, "You Are Not Christ"

After watching Breath again, I triumphantly nudged Christian and told him I have unlocked the mystery in the Kim Ki Duk opus. "No one talks," I said, and he looked at me the way a father eyed his most needy child. "Yes, distrust of language," he summarized for my benefit, "evident in all his films," and he may or may not have patted me on the head to tell me to keep on trying, who knows, a sliver of wisdom might someday peek in from behind the cumulonimbus of my confusion.



But it is inescapable: because it is the pervading silences in the film that power the gestures, the choreography, the semiotics, and the few heartfelt times that Yeon (Park Ji-ah) actually talks. The housewife, besieged by the infidelity of her husband Baron Geisler Ha Jung-woo, becomes fixated with a death row prisoner who has repeatedly tried to commit suicide. With a zombie-like resilience so typical of Korean female protagonists, she hails a taxi one night and asks the driver to take her to the penitentiary (in a dream-like journey to the city's outskirts that may very well resemble her own turning inward), where she pretends to be an ex-girlfriend of the prisoner, Jang Jin's (Chang Chen), so she can see him.


In this way it begins. A ghost in her home, Yeon visits Jang with a vitality that we reserve for our dearest routines; and when they finally come face to face, it is unlike any between prisoner and visitor. Complete with wallpaper and props, the visits begin with a whimsical production number that quickly descends into a death row-type confession, complete with childhood anecdotes about death and dying, and how it is really not so bad.

It is here, during these visits, these transactions, that Breath gains currency as mainly a depiction of an exchange, perhaps symbiotic, like breathing: whereas Jang benefits from the visits in the way of precious feminine, maybe maternal, contact (understandably inured to the masculine, though itself tender, relationship he has with his three cellmates) and an experience of the "outside", Yeon, for her part, heals, or at least begins to heal, chooses to heal, in accelerated fashion, even, dictated by the quick change in "seasons." The final "blow" that Yeon administers, while not premeditated, I would argue, cements this reading, that when it comes, it is breathtaking (if you know what I mean).


That the visits are themed according to the four seasons (with "Winter" perhaps needing no demonstration as it unfolds outside) reveals a preoccupation with time - its relentless passage - and the exterior - in Yeon's attempts to bring it inside. There is something being said here about continuity and enduring and, consequently, death and entropy. There is a comment here, too, about the artificiality of things, about aesthetics, the "interventions" - necessarily cosmetic, undergirded with a little looniness - clearly gesturing toward a powergrab, as if to say, Look, here's how flimsy time is, how interior and exterior are not necessarily diametric. The shots of "outdoors" behind bars and Yeon's emphatic ripping of the wallpaper and burning of everything at the end of each "performance" point toward this ambivalence.

Jang's response is pure elation. From a consuming desire to end his life, he gains something to look forward to, which is saying much if one is in the throes of death. He also stops trying to kill himself (his chosen method, a sharpened toothbrush at the throat, yet another strike against speech). For her part, Yeon is energized even as each visit leaves her visibly enervated. Perhaps it is simplistic to look at it as mere distraction, or rechanneling, but the ways we bring about and seek catharsis are many, and in the end the route to it scarcely makes a difference.

But what sort of transformation exactly has this catharsis ushered in in Yeon's mind? It is at this point that Breath becomes uncharacteristically legible, due mostly to her talkative, dramatic husband. After he breaks it off with his mistress (in shots that cut, quickly, from him being slapped by a disembodied hand; to Yeon looking on, forlorn; to Jang back in his cell intently peering at a polaroid of Yeon), things unravel and appear to be resolved by a think-about-the-kids pronouncement from the prodigal husband. And so when she smashes a clay sculpture (of a woman with a hole in her chest) she had freshly taken out of a kiln, or hand-washes a piece of linen she had intentionally dropped from the balcony, you know there is something else she is breaking, there is something else she is cleansing.

Bawal sa Lovapalooza

The final act, therefore, is a belated decision on the part of Yeon (sorry, feminists). She is jolted into a sense of compassion - the need for release instead of trudging on - and it is easy to draw a parallel between this and her own realization about her marriage. As for Jang, the "attack" surprises him, but back in his cell, as the finality of his circumstance dawns on him, he relishes the final merciful act from his cellmates, whom he had increasingly ignored during the visits. There may have been physiological resistance, but we know that those tears fell in a combination of gratitude and tender acceptance. The song for "winter," which Yeon sings with her husband on their drive back from prison, is a funeral hymn. "As I get hit by the white snow," they croon, "seeing you walk away, even though I call with sorrow, only the white snow falls." In his cell, Jang finally gets his freedom, the superior variety.

Lately I have been thinking a lot about circularity, which is to say, oneness. For one jolting moment, for instance, heat is indistinguishable from cold. It is just a sensation. In Breath, freedom and imprisonment, grief and joy, intake and release, all seem to operate in the same manner. There is something to be said of a countenance that reveals all that we need to know. In Jang's final flinch and narrowing of eyes, we see, simultaneously, all these things. Here is a man whose crime, it is later revealed, was muder. He killed his wife and kids then lay with the dead bodies. Say what you want about mortal justice, about hanging on. When one flimsy breath separates everything, you realize how delicate the divides really are.

Shame (Steve McQueen, 2011)

(Shame is an important film to Christian and me.)


First, spoiler alert: not even a generous view of Michael Fassbender's (famed) penduluming semi-flaccidity can rescue Shame from being the most un-erotic film (tangentially) about sex. To be sure, for the casual porn viewer, there are scenes here to which you can jack off (with satisfying results), but at the end of it, your libido would have undergone the most rigorous examination it had ever had the misfortune of going through. And in its wake: shame.

Or should there be? The film seems to be adamant in its distant, almost clinical treatment of sexual addiction, taking great pains to show that it is complex (it doesn't only happen to hideous pariahs), that the "normal people" against which it is premised is as precarious a classification as the fiction of our everyday performances. In fact, left on his own, Brandon (Fassbender) would have lived through life a happy, functional man: filling his office hard drive with porn, jacking off every chance he gets, and fucking with whores like they're going to be contraband tomorrow. Chances are, Brandon's last breathe is going to coincide with the stirring convulsion of orgasm. Show me a luckier man. Hmm? Show me. Absent any moralizing gaze or institutional expectations, anyone will be hardpressed to ascribe any inherent tragedy in such a life.

"I want your love. I want your love." Weh.

But childhood has a way of sneaking up on you. Enter his sister Sissy (Carrie Mulligan), whose presence we first encounter as a languid voice trapped in Brandon's answering machine, one which he readily, habitually switches off. When she finally materializes inside Brandon's cold, sterile bachelor's pad, he senses an intruder (with a penchant for 70s disco music) and grabs a baseball bat. He finds Sissy bathing in the comfort room, a hitherto private space where much of the film's pivotal sequences will occur. The anthem that scores their first encounter is almost, well, naked in its point:


(These diegetic commentaries litter the film. Early on, as Brandon stares absentmindedly during a meeting, his boss rattles off, "I find you disgusting. I find you inconsolable," while quoting "cynics" for a marketing pitch. In the immortal words of Dr. Tope, there you go.)

Cum face, in porn parlance.

The narrative will eventually hint at an unhappy, perhaps abusive childhood for the two. In a message to Brandon before another suicide attempt, Sissy's recorded voice reminds him that they are not "bad people," they just came from a "bad place," while the screen explodes with a cacophony of bouncing flesh - Brandon's and two prostitutes' - in a rumbunctious bout of sad, desperate lovemaking. Cut to Brandon's face, broken, on the verge of a breakdown, in so much pain.


Sissy's most naked long shot, meanwhile, finds her fully clothed and onstage, singing a slow, gut-wrenching version of the typically exuberant New York, New York. There's no escaping the vulnerability and nostalgia in Sissy's voice, successfully communicating, to my mind, a lifetime's worth of ache. Toward the end, when the shot cuts to Brandon's face as he tries to blink back tears, it is clear that she is talking to him, that New York, where the film is set, is as much a place where they now find themselves in as a place, really, of escape.

Not Cubao.

This private language, at times unarticulated, would peek in between the cussing and seeming disregard, the cariño brutal school of lovin'. On the night she first arrives, he finds her discarded boa and sniffs it. While waiting for the train in the subway, he plays around with her "vintage" hat and admonishes her to stop, quite literally, teetering on the edge. Finally, the level of nudity this relationship endures suggests a kind of superlative, if not uneasy, intimacy.

And so we realize, as we ought to, when dealing with addictions, that these people are damaged, that they have wounds that they are constantly dousing with the balm of sex, for Brandon, and love, for Sissy. This is psychology at its most simplistic, but it is also the tightrope on which Shame's rationale rests, and attempts to cross. The nuance here comes in the acting of both Fassbender and Mulligan, in the liminal vacuum that their childhoods have left, in their respective attempts to confront it.


This  sequence, for instance, caps off Brandon's downward spiral, an unraveling that came - that indeed was pushed - by a thwarted attempt at a "normal" sex life, when he purged his pad of all pornography and went out with a co-worker. From harmless masturbation and business-like arrangements with whores, he sheds all manner of subtlety and tries to pick up a woman with lewd language. He even finds himself in a gay club (a dangerous trick, however, correlating the space with the final alarming straw).

He discovers Sissy's suicide attempt the morning after his sex binge, a punctuation that shakes his previously unflinching foundation. The level of control Brandon has over things at this point has been a contentious topic for Christian and me. It's true that he drops to the ground in a heap of sobs, a scene that rings with absolutely no triumphalist note; that the ending mirrors the opening, pointing toward a cyclic incarnation of events; that Shame successfully explains why there ought to be no Shame, for people have reasons and there is nothing that requires them to explain themselves.


I would've ended the film at a more ambiguous point, but it seems as if Shame wishes to be decisive, about pain and our powerlessness in its wake. There is an accounting here of reasons and stories: from the resonance of childhood to an adult claim at goodness. For Brandon at least, to demand correction at this point is not only futile and unfair, it would  negate all his attempts at humanity, at living, which in itself is a strike at the sad, debilitating incapacity, and reason enough to not feel shame.