The Air I Breathe - Review - 5/5 stars

The Air I Breathe is based on an ancient proverb which says that all emotions are different but they are always connected. With that, the film tells a story of four different characters, each representing an emotion, which are each connected. These characters and emotions are: Happiness represented by a bored businessman (Forest Whitaker) with an obsession with butterflies who bets his life on a horse race after he discovers there has been a fix; Pleasure represented by a gangster (Brendan Fraser) who sees the future must decide whether or not to follow his visions; Sorrow represented by a beautiful pop star (Sarah Michelle Gellar) who finds her management contract unexpectedly in jeopardy and Love represented by a doctor (Kevin Bacon) who tries to save the love of his life from a deadly injury. A common thread weaves its way through the lives of these characters: the ruthless crime boss Fingers (Andy Garcia).

The title “The Air I Breathe” makes the film sound poetic as breathing air is essentially life and the transition of it. The film opens with a quote “No emotion, any more than a wave, can long retain its own individual form” by Henry Ward Beecher, which implies the characters are connected through their emotions. A clever approach is that the main characters’ names are never revealed (except Gellar’s character who’s stage name is Trista but refuses to tell her real name), they each have a back-story revealing the reason behind their feelings but the viewer only knows the character by what their emotion is.

This is Jieho Lee’s directorial debut and he did an amazing job, most of the scenes were shot beautifully with excellent cinematography e.g. a scene where Sorrow is standing on a rooftop a sheet covering her is blown to make it look like wings and has beautiful sunrise in the background. With clever direction and editing, “The Air I Breathe” has the look of a big budget film, but it’s not. On a negative side, the dialogue was quite blunt and not very well written, but that was forgiven from a number of poetic statements from some of the characters, including “… when a butterfly leaves the safety of its cocoon, does it realize how beautiful it has become?. Or does it still just see itself as a caterpillar?” and “Sometimes the things you can’t change, they end up changing you.” That makes it relevant to the storyline as the film has a poetic and artistic theme, which is made to leave questions as opposed to answers as art aspires to do. Even though it’s artistic, the storylines manage to look realistic even when Brendan Fraser’s character is seeing into the future it just looks like mental images that everyone gets when they try to think what the future maybe like. The soundtrack plays a good part as the opening music sets up real excitement, but then a very peaceful piece of music is used to set the tone for the film.

The acting gives this film a real advantage, including Brendan Fraser who plays a depressed character adding real charisma outstandingly to the role.  He manages to show the evolution of his emotion from depression to pleasure really well. Forest Whitaker and Kevin Bacon add a great support to the cast and they did a good job portraying their emotions, but there screen-time is limited. Andy Garcia plays the main villain, which is the character that weaves the other characters together. It was rumoured that he represents Anger because the way he presents his character showed flawlessly the emotion of anger very successfully that makes his character a figure the audience can hate. However, the real star of this film is Sarah Michelle Gellar as she gives her best performance to date with the deepest emotion to play. Forget about her as the hero from “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” or the rich bitch from “Cruel Intentions”, this time she plays a very frail human being in need of help, and she knows how portray sadness perfectly.

What makes “The Air I Breathe” a great film is not that it plays out as a crime drama but because it has a very unique style, it’s like watching a poem.