Simon Baker's Breath, and Perth's latest pop-up cinema - no summer required!
It's like the universe heard me bitching publicly about how there wasn't a cinema in Perth city. It has now indignantly dropped one on my doorstep, 700 metres from my house.
The Girls School Cinema is run by the same lot who run the Rooftop movies in Northbridge each summer, and I can't tell them how grateful I am that the penny has dropped and Perth is now providing a pop up cinema experience in winter. It's small, colourful, comfortable and it's on until September 29.
I was thrilled to see Breath on there as I'd missed its run at the big movies.
We didn't know it yet, but we'd already imagined ourselves into a different life.
Tim Winton released Breath in 2008, a coming-of-age novel about two teenage boys from a country town in southern WA, about their discovery of and obsession with surfing and their relationship with their mysterious surfing guru Sando. They all grow close, and then one of the boys, Pikelet, has an affair with Sando's wife while he is away on a surfing trip.
It's a deceptively quiet storyline, in which everything is happening below the surface. And yet it's quite a long movie, and even more impressively it doesn't drag. Simon Baker (from The Mentalist) makes an impressive directorial debut, pulling you on with quiet force and a constant undertow of tension. Tim Winton himself provides the voice of the narrator. Baker is also starring as Sando, and is pitch-perfect as the laid-back, yet intense man anxious that the boys understand and respect the magic of becoming one with the water, and pushing them to take risks that will change their relationships with themselves and with each other.
His costars, the boys Pikelet and Loonie (played by newcomers Samson Coulter, of Manly, and Ben Spence, of Margaret River) gave revelatory performances, and The Great Gatsby's Elizabeth Debicki was spot on as Sando's angry and troubled wife Eva, a woman living like a trapped animal after injury derailed her own daredevil sporting career.
Filmed in Denmark, it showcased the wild and lonely surf, cliffs and forests of southern WA as though they were part of the cast; appropriate for the works of Winton, in which landscape is always integral. It was positively soaked with moody colours and heaving dark-blue seas and sunkissed, loose-limbed youth. It was one of those films so lovely it makes you ache inside, sad and happy simultaneously and full of a nameless longing. So beautiful I forgot my Australian cultural cringe, and just felt proud to live in such a place and grateful someone had the skill to bring its beauty alive.
Breath is available on iTunes here.
More on Girls School Cinema here.