Within the first three minutes of Breathe In, the stage is set for Felicity Jones’s entrance. Keith Reynolds (played by a whiskery Guy Pearce) is a frustrated part-time musician, who, like many an artist before him, has ceded his impulsive and unorthodox life to a regimen of bills, children and regular pay. He is a music teacher who was never meant to be a music teacher. Or so he says. He sits in his office (a sort of shrine to his adolescent self) and groans over letters from his employer (“Hello educators!”) reminding him that a new school year is about to commence. He hides photographs of his old band in a stationary box on his desk.
Keith’s wife Megan, played by the magnificent Amy Ryan (also known as Officer Beadie from The Wire), is drearily co-opted into the list of trivialities that make Keith’s a life worth leaving. She collects and sells antique cookie jars. She also claims to enjoy driving her daughter Lauren (Mackenzie Davis) from place to place. Lauren is a tall adolescent who likes hunky boys and swimming and not reading books, a populist contrast with her bohemian father. When Keith suggests the family might move to New York City, he is laughed at by his wife. What a boring old grown-up she is!
Into the humdrum steps Sophie Williams: a moody, adorably toothy ingénue from the UK staying with Keith and his family for a term, who just so happens to be a reluctant musical prodigy. When she joins Keith’s class he puts her on the spot, asking her to play something for her peers by way of introduction. She angrily bangs out one of Chopin’s warm-up routines, her thick black ponytail hanging over one shoulder as she grimaces at her teacher and host.
Initially indifferent, Keith’s interest is piqued. Here begins a series of will-they-won’t-they moments characterised by longing glances, pregnant silences and slow, staccato dialogue, improvised by the actors according to the method preferred by director Drake Doremus (who directed Jones in 2011 drama Like Crazy). The film, for all its Lolita-esque potential, is remarkably chaste. The pair’s magnetism is driven less by lust than the will to escape everything they see as holding them back. It is never exactly clear who is leading and who is being led.
In the meantime, Keith’s daughter Lauren is busy doing everything that Sophie is just too brooding and aloof to bother with: she is out getting drunk, being jealous and showing the kinds of vulnerabilities that would be expected of someone her age. When we are not being seduced by the handsomeness of Pearce and Jones, the gorgeous pale blue photography, lush interiors and deep, orchestral score (Keith is a cellist), it is the trials of Lauren and her mother Megan with whom we are most able to identify.
But just look at that face. Sophie’s mum, we learn, died when she was a child. She was raised by her aunt and pianist uncle, the latter having recently passed away – facts which might explain both the character’s talent and her dismissive behaviour – that is if she’s telling the truth.
Words pass between Keith and Sophie about “the rules” that keep them from doing what they want – rules which they could ignore, but not without paying for it (at least in the moral universe of US indie cinema). The narrative denouement attempts to compensate for the lingering melancholy by providing an almighty bang, though this dramatic surge isn’t necessarily the antidote required. For all the respect shown to Jones throughout the film (one pool-side scene aside), the simple premise of a middle-aged man constantly staring at a girl the same age as his daughter might have been unforgivable, if not for the fact that by looking at her face he is forced to see his own.
Breathe In is out now.
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