This movie is about 'being in the moment' & beautifully crafted within that context.Breath is......Life passion curiosity learning yearning fear youth pain love panic risks age knowing. Human life is breath. Breathing. Being alive.Simon Baker has encapsulated the beauty & fear of being alive.

As many others have noted, the photography for this film is noteworthy, and the production elements do indeed bleed into an Australian style I can identify with as a resident and citizen. I'm familiar with Simon Baker's work and it was interesting to see him try a hand at directing. I look forward to seeing him have another crack with a story which deserves to be told, instead of the meandering, unremarkable stroll of unlinked scenes this screenplay boasts.It's difficult to say where the fault lies, but there's a remarkable lack of "big-picture" focus across what little narrative is here. There are far too many scenes that barely take up any time and barely relate to other scenes. So much time is wasted watching characters do so little. There's so little through line or plot that the film relies on sparse retrospective narration to give even an ounce of purpose to it's movement. And despite being directed by one of the most implicitly charming Australian actors working today, the film is devoid of a single likable character. I don't blame the lead actor for this, but any interest I had in seeing his journey play out at all waned extremely quickly, because he has no admirable traits or goals, and those who surround him are similar. The character has so little agency, traits come and go. The teenage tropes the story plays with from time to time are played for too straight, as if someone believed the Australian coming-of-age plot hidden in here required to tone of a moody British independent film. The sexual parts of this film aren't so much off putting and poorly handled (although they are) as they are an indicator of how little steam the initial premise of the narrative has. - Boring kid likes surfing. Kid gets scared sometimes. Cool. I guess they do what they can with that before moving onto some tactless pedophilia subject matter with zero-self awareness, which also ultimately goes nowhere. All in all not a good use of anyone's time. Not sure I'll remember a single thing about it in a year, except the bile that rose up in my throat during the bag scenes, causing me to momentarily leave a theatre for the first time in my living memory. Earn your emotion.

Award-winning novels do not always lead to award-winning films. As we know, the novel's unbounded imaginative space reigns free while the movie is constrained within sight and sound. The coming-of-age film Breath (2017)is beautiful to look at, but its clichéd characters and banal dialogue make it a rather ordinary translation of Tim Winton's widely acclaimed book.The story is framed as a middle-age nostalgic flashback to growing up in a logging village on the spectacular West Australian coastline. We follow through the eyes of a young teenager called Pikelet (Samson Coulter) who, with his aptly-named best friend Loonie (Ben Spence), are inducted into the surfing culture of the 1970s. Their dreams of conquering big waves are made real when they are befriended by a 40-something former top surfer and off-the-grid hippy called Sando (Simon Baker). He becomes their mentor, inspiring them with zen-like dogma about the mastery of one's inner fears and the purism of doing something as pointlessly elegant as riding a dangerously large wave. Meanwhile, Sando's surly girlfriend Eva (Elizabeth Debicki) limps around in the background with a chronic injury from top-tier competitive skiing. She is cool towards the teenagers until Sando and Loonie take off to Indonesia to chase even bigger waves, leaving young Pikelet to herself.Sexual initiation is not always recalled through misty lens. Eva has dangerously weird taste in bed and no qualms about the boy's lack of maturity. While the camera spends a lot of time watching them together it is never close enough to earn an 18+ rating. Pikelet finds himself between two worlds: innocent school friends on one hand, and a worldly woman who uses him as a toy on the other. It is not so different to the space between mastering a wave for fun and chasing one to prove you are not scared.The enduring high point of Breath is its cinematography. Lush rainforests, ruggedly rocky coastlines, and white-crested rollers are captured with almost lyrical beauty. The cameras spend a lot of time on top of and under the water, and some of the wave shots can make you gasp. However,the characters are one-dimensional, the dialogue often inauthentically mystical, and there is not a trace of narrative tension. Eva remains a shadowy person and her past sporting career is barely mentioned. Women's achievements don't count for much in a man's world, but the film labours at length but simplistically over what it takes to be a man. A particularly insipid example is early in the film the two teenagers get around on under-sized kid's BMX bicycles, but the day after Pikelet's sexual initiation he suddenly appears on a full-size bike. Really; is that all it takes?If Breathhas serious messages about growing up with worthwhile values, they only hang in limbo, unformed and unexplored. No doubt there will be different responses from those who read the book, those who fondly remember the 1970s, and those for whom sex and surfing is still a pathway to adulthood. If it achieves anything, it highlights how much more complex growing up is today.

I read each new Tim Winton book as they come out. He's one of Australia's best writers and his work is certainly the most authentic Australiana. So, even though I've admired Simon Baker's work for many years, I worried that the film would be hard-pressed to match the quality of the written story. The anxiety was wasted; Breath the movie is a superb rendering of the book, managing to capture the moods, emotions, fears love and the allure of surfing in an understated and intimate way, even while omitting sections of the book, which was a complex 215 pages, and redirecting the thrust of the novel. At almost two hours, it's paced in a tempo that matches the period, the people and the lifestyle and flows past like the beautiful waves at Barney's. The young actors are brilliant but congratulations to all concerned because so is the film.