Movie Review: A Breath Away (2018)

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AKA: Just a Breath Away; Toxic; Dans la brume

With so much of the film's budget and overall success dependent upon its special effects, it's become standard operating procedure for disaster movies to move as quickly as possible to get right to the catastrophic event.

Sketching the main characters with the broadest of strokes before placing them in peril, with only the briefest of introductions to guide us, all too often in this genre it's up to the actors and audience to fill in the rest.

And that's precisely what happens in director Daniel Roby's A Breath Away, which flies the viewer and our lead Mathieu (Romain Duris) to Paris and hits the ground running, before that is, the ground strikes back by knocking out the power after an earthquake and filling the city with toxic gas.

Discovering the deadly effect of the mist as bodies drop before his eyes, Mathieu races across the street from his apartment to the one that Olga Kurylenko’s scientist and teacher Anna shares with their beloved daughter Sarah (Fantine Harduin), who suffers from an immunodeficiency disorder and lives in a glass bubble.

While thanks to battery power, she's safe for the time being in her filtered air enclosure, Mathieu and Anna have no choice but to climb as high as they can past the line where the fog stops.

Taking refuge in the top-floor apartment alongside their elderly neighbors (Michel Robin and Anne Gaylor), after discovering that the substance is not only rising but also doesn't affect their skin, Mathieu suddenly turns into Indiana Jones while going on the hunt for supplies and oxygen masks so he and Anna can continue to change Sarah's bubble battery.

Realizing that help is not coming, they risk everything to track down the medical equipment their daughter would need for them all to leave the building together.

Never clarifying just what Mathieu's current relationship is with Anna and most pressingly, how he acquired his particular set of Liam Neeson worthy skills, while the logic challenged film asks you to overlook a lot (including how he suddenly seems to know the rules of surviving in the mist), the actors are game and Breath's cinematography and visual effects are first rate.

Shot by Pierre-Yves Bastard and boasting effects by Bruno Mallard and a gifted team, visually of course, A Breath Away pays tribute to thematically similar works such as The Fog and The Mist.

However, in pulse quick quickening action sequences which find Mathieu and Anna wandering the foggy streets of Paris with only a flashlight to guide them before Mathieu must race back to the apartment through a rooftop obstacle course, Roby's film is also reminiscent of apocalyptic disaster movies like I Am Legend and World War Z.

A far cry from his more contemplative roles in highbrow fare, it's here where we realize just how much A Breath Away is augmented by character actor Romain Duris' commitment — even to the ridiculous — in an impressive turn as our surprisingly action oriented lead.

Desperately in need of a stronger script, although Breath generates its fair share of excitement, it's a shame that, despite the talented cast and what should have been a naturally touching storyline, we just don't feel that connected to characters we know so extraordinarily little about.

Couple that with the film's inconsistency, including introducing Mathieu as a motorcycle rider and then forgetting he has a motorcycle until the end of the movie which — awesome action scenes aside — sure would have made more sense than wasting time and oxygen running around Paris by foot and we're left with a film that changes from scene to scene, kind of like the mist.

Infused with a pro-environmental message, while about halfway through the movie we start to get an inkling as to where this will all be heading, it still makes for an intriguingly Shyamalanesque turn of events, even if we wish that the work overall would've been worthier of the plot twist.

Striving to give its viewers a little of everything from action to horror to family drama, Roby's film loses its footing thanks to a weak foundation. And although it has its moments, like most disaster movies, A Breath Away will most likely be remembered for its big catastrophic event, a running Romain Duris, and foggy special effects.

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Moliere

Director:
Laurent Tirard

In this delectable, frothy, yet mostly decorative confection, three of Moliere’s beloved plays “Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme,” “The Misanthrope,” and “Tartuffe” are sifted together with a generous helping of Shakespeare in Love and Casanova added in for flavor. The result is an entertaining and gorgeously photographed although largely fictitious look at the famous French seventeenth century playwright Moliere or as he is better known throughout the bulk of the film, Jean-Baptiste Poquelin.

Played by one of my favorite dark haired, dreamy eyed French actors, Romain Duris (L’Auberge Espagnole, Dans Paris), we first meet Moliere in 1658 after he’s spent thirteen years with his theatrical troupe entertaining citizens in the provinces and steadily building up such a reputation that upon his arrival, the king gives him a Parisian theatre to stage his latest work.

The only catch is that the king has a weakness for comedies and Moliere, long tired of farces, desperately wants to deliver his audiences an epic tragedy but his mind is changed after a young woman pays him a visit and beckons him to go see her gravely ill mother. Moliere’s relation to the women and indeed their identity is kept hidden from viewers although it’s fairly easy to guess the facts only a half hour or so after the film ventures back to thirteen years earlier when struggling performer Moliere is arrested for failing to pay a large debt.

His cry of “A plague on creditors; long live the theatre!” seems to fall on deaf ears until the wealthy M. Jourdain (Intimate Strangers star Fabrice Luchini) offers to cover his debts in exchange for acting lessons. Bewitched by the sharp-tongued young beauty Celimene (Swimming Pool’s Ludivine Sagnier) the married Jourdain wrote a one act play to win the fair maiden’s favor and in order to hide his hopeful future seduction from his wife, he asks Moliere to stay with him at his home under the guise of priesthood as Moliere must pretend he is Father Tartuffe.

The clever script, which could have easily fallen into farce is saved by the talented Jourdain who earned a Best Actor award for his performance at the Moscow International Film Festival as he plays the entire thing straight, making the comedy both accidental and spontaneous while Jourdain balances his schedule of taking music, dance and painting lessons with his duties of husband and father thereby hiding his true passion for acting out of guilt for his intended affair. The lovely Laura Morante (Dancer Upstairs, Avenue Montaigne) stars as Jourdain’s wife who, suspicious of Moliere’s appearance and her husband’s sudden interest in the church, quickly becomes the target of the younger man’s affections as we find Moliere up to his old tricks of trying to win her over with earnest romantic words both written and spoken.

While Moliere purists will no doubt feel dismayed by the film that appears to have been undertaken in the same spirit as the misguided fictitious biopic Becoming Jane about Jane Austen, Moliere succeeds where Jane did not by celebrating Moliere’s spirit in keeping the work as entertaining as one of his plots in this sumptuously photographed film which earned four Cesar Award nominations in its native France. Although it may not qualify as the proper Moliere nourishment, the end result is something quite close to a cinematic French dessert—scrumptious, luscious yet minus the calories of a French Silk Pie.

Dans Paris

Translated Titles:
Inside Paris
or
In Paris
Director:
Christophe Honore

In my teens I fell in love with the French New Wave or more accurately the gorgeously inventive if admittedly pretentious cinema of what occurs to lovers after the “happily ever after” usually featuring intellectually snobbish, sad-eyed and soulful dreamers including Jean-Paul Belmondo or Jean-Pierre Leaud as they fall in and out of love with beguiling and maddeningly aloof women such as Anna Karina or Catherine Deneuve. With sweeping scores, jump-cuts, and nonlinear narratives, it’s the type of filmmaking audiences either love or hate but to love New Wave is to fall hard (both blindly and passionately) and New Wave fans are my favorite kind of film lovers.

However, when New Wave fans begin to direct, the results at times are mixed with the incredible Godard inspired Tarantinto masterwork Pulp Fiction to the disconcertingly uneven yet compulsively watchable Dans Paris from novelist and playwright turned writer/director Christophe Honore.

L’Auberge Espagnole star Romain Duris stars as Paul whose relationship with Anna ends after the two fall out of love and overwhelmingly depressed and near-suicidal, the gloomy Paul returns home to live in the apartment occupied by his father played by Guy Marchand (Cesar nominated for his role). Also living at home is the scene-stealer of Dans Paris who comes in the form of Paul's gorgeous, much younger brother Jonathan (The Dreamers star Louis Garrel) who spends his time attending class when he feels like it and others perpetually seducing women with such questioning lines as “Can I possibly kiss you? It’s a matter of life or death.”

With a running time of roughly ninety minutes, not a frame is wasted in the hands of Honore, who sets himself up as the New Wave’s most ardent and fanatic devotee with his painstaking homage to the movement that on one hand seems unspeakably pretentious but on the other helps breathe life into a story that, had it been told in a more traditional manner such as the increasingly depressing fare of American independent film, would have had audiences pressing eject after only a dozen minutes.

A hit in his native France, reaction to Honore’s Dans Paris or rather its influence from the New Wave forefathers had critics divided with The Hollywood Reporter dismissing it as “a greatest-hits collection of French cinema” with its references to Godard, Demy, Rivette, and Truffaut (although I would also add Lelouch and Chabrol to the list) and Manola Dargis of The New York Times assessing Honore as someone who “may be a student of the New Wave but he’s not a slave, and he steers clear of pastiche in this film precisely because he knows the difference between empty imitation and creative inspiration.” With Dargis overstating it and The Hollywood Reporter flippantly understating it, it’s up to the viewer to decide how the New Wave references play out. As far as I’m concerned, the result is in between the critical assessments for Honore’s above average work, which benefits tremendously from Garrel and especially Duris’ dynamic portrayals and for my money, any film that may make its viewers seek out New Wave classics deserves an A for effort any day of the week, even though I’d probably give Dans Paris a B.