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.