If he never makes another movie, Simon Baker can be proud of Breath. Most of the credit goes to Tim Winton's book, of course, but Baker has managed not to botch its adaptation to the screen – an achievement for an actor on debut as director. More than that, he has made a movie of sometimes transcendent beauty, about something rarely depicted on our screens.
I'm not talking about surfing, although that is part of the film's achievement: the stunning water footage captures what it's like to be out there, cold and fearful, on a swell that threatens mortality. I'm talking about relating the notion of beauty to the emotions of men, specifically Australian men. In Breath, we see men pursuing something higher, not lower.
In the book, surfing transforms Winton's young narrator, as he watches men "dancing themselves across the bay with smiles on their faces and sun in their hair… How strange it was to see men do something beautiful. Something pointless and elegant, as though nobody saw or cared."
The book is set on the coast of Western Australia where Winton learned to surf. His voice serves as narrator in a script adapted by Winton and Gerard Lee. Baker filmed around the town of Denmark, on the south coast near Albany, and it's an astonishingly powerful landscape: huge trees in thick, dank forests, rocky shores and cliffs plumed with seaspray. There's a sense of loneliness, wildness and impermanence – as though the small shacks clinging to the land could be blown away any minute by a whim from Antarctica. And this is where men and boys go into the cold hard water for fun?
The setting is the 1970s. Pikelet (Samson Coulter) and Loonie (Ben Spence), two 13-year-olds, stare out at the waves and wonder if they could do that. They have already taught themselves the basics when an older man with saltwater-bleached hair and a Kombi ute takes them under his wing. Sando (Simon Baker) lives just back off the beach with his mysterious American girlfriend Eva (Elizabeth Debicki), who's sullen. The boys don't care: they are just grateful they can leave their boards in Sando's shed, and not have to carry them home on their bicycles.
Pikelet is shy, bookish and sensitive – a good student with a level head and loving parents (Richard Roxburgh and Rachael Blake). Loonie is wild and funny and untethered: his father, the publican in their small town, biffs him often. They're an unlikely pair, except that Loonie is fearless and Pikelet wishes he was. Surfing becomes their path to manhood – the place where they learn to manage their fears. Sando becomes their zen master, teaching them the water arts: how to read swells and weather, how to be in the moment, how to feed off the fear.
It would be easy to ruin Sando with too much soul-surfer mysticism – and there was a lot of that about in the 1970s – but Baker only gives us a little. He concentrates on bringing out strong performances from the boys, whose characters are looking for role-models. Eva may wonder why her grown man is so interested in these weeds, but she's too consumed by her own crippling leg injury to care.
Baker builds up two distinct worlds: land and sea. On land, life can be dull and painful, bounded by rules and duties. At sea, on their ugly salvaged boards, the boys experience freedom, exhilaration, transcendence… the pointless elegance that Winton writes about. Aussie films have always been obsessed with masculinity, but not in this way. Our national cinema offers a hundred different ways to be a bloke: fewer depictions of being young and lost, full of fear and yearning, brimming with potential but not judgment. The book takes Pikelet's story to a dark place; the film softens that. Except for one unnecessary and jarring shot near the end, Baker hardly puts a foot wrong. It helps that he grew up surfing, and that he has waited for the right story.
There is something bigger here than simple coming-of-age, although there is that too. It's a film about the cracks in our masculinity, rather than the thing itself. There's disappointment, disillusion, the harsh realisation that adults have to make hard decisions. It's a grown up film about youth, in that sense, and unexpectedly moving.
The ADG Awards were established in order to celebrate the outstanding achievements and contributions by Australian Directors, and are the only peer-judged awards for directors in Australia. Held in Melbourne, the awards celebrate excellence in the craft and art of directing across film, television, documentary, animation and interactive media.
Simon Baker adapts Tim Winton’s coming-of-age novel for his directorial debut
When Tim Winton’s latest novel, The Shepherd’s Hut, was released in March, he departed from the traditional book launch with a series of keynotes on the topic of “toxic masculinity”. “Boys and young men are so routinely expected to betray their better natures,” said Winton, “to smother their consciences, to renounce the best of themselves and submit to something low and mean.”
Winton described the culture on the ocean’s swell, where each evening several male generations commune in the lulls between waves. These boys “rehearsing their masculinity” could be any of the suffering surfers who’ve populated the littoral author’s writing since he won the Vogel in 1981. Yet it feels jarring to recast Winton’s melancholic characters in the parlance of contemporary feminism – say, Lockie Leonard from the ’90s YA novels or Vic Lang of short story collection The Turning (2004) – who often seem frozen in their time.
None are more emblematic of these latent tender hearts than Bruce Pike and Ivan Loon from the Miles Franklin-winning novel Breath (2008), both trying on postures of macho bravado. Simon Baker’s faithful new screen adaptation makes what Winton calls the “shackle[s of] misogyny” plain. Best known for his lead acting role in long-running US police procedural The Mentalist (2008–2015), Baker’s directorial debut is a nostalgic portrait of two boys floundering on the precipice of a dangerously adult world.
We meet “Pikelet” and “Loonie” (played by real-life grommets Samson Coulter and Ben Spence) wrestling in the water with a tactile affection soon to be expunged. Any misconception they’re on the cusp of manhood is struck out by the sight of their fragile bodies – these are the lithe limbs of children, more likely to grow up to be the skinny ratbags of Rennie Ellis’ 1984 Life’s a Beach series than the bronzed Adonis of Max Dupain’s Sunbaker (1937).
Winton’s writing has tended to make for middlebrow cinema, most recently in the underwhelming 2013 anthology film The Turning. Phillip Noyce, who eventually abandoned an adaptation of Dirt Music, claimed that “a poetic novel is just difficult to translate into a movie”. Baker is better than most at capturing the original novel’s mood – with an adult Pikelet narrating his bygone youth – but the film’s alignment of the liminal shoreline with adolescence is a familiar trope of Australian cinema. Here it’s more the subterranean menace of Blackrock (1997) than the kitsch critique of Puberty Blues (1981).
Cinematographer Marden Dean renders an eternal coastal winter, with sand-weathered clapboard houses washed out in hazy blues and yellows. Beyond the break lies an escape from small-town tedium, whether it’s Pikelet’s “ordinary” parents (played by Richard Roxburgh and Rachael Blake) or the covert fury of Loonie’s father (Jacek Koman). In quiet moments the boys’ legs jiggle manically, thrumming with the pent-up energy of puberty. Surfing becomes an extension of their intensifying competition, with the reckless Loonie urging Pikelet out into deeper waters
Soon they’re taken under the wing of Sando (played by Baker himself, with charm and vague threat), an experienced surfer who braves the waves others cower at: Old Smoky, Barney’s, and the mythic Nautilus. Sando grows larger in the boys’ adulation, relishing the role of briny mage, expounding half-baked philosophies ripped from the pages of surfer’s bible Tracks about living in the moment and surrendering to the water. “You’re completely alive. It’s just like you felt the hand of God,” he tells his audience of two. “That’s fucken’ hippie shit,” says Loonie, who tries to pretend he’s not under Sando’s spell. Sando soon plays the boys off against one another, using his fickle approval to rupture their bond.
The sighs of Sando’s wife Eva (Elizabeth Debicki) imply she knows this routine well. Flaxen haired and stormy, she’s blurred around the edges. Her secret lies in a mangled leg, a heavy symbol of her woundedness that she’s forced to lug around. There’s some half-hearted attempts to colour her in: a frustrated athlete with just as many yearnings as the boys around her. It’s tempting explain away her haziness as symptomatic of Pikelet’s limited vision, but surely the grown man looking back could see her sharper details.
Dare we compare Eva to the ocean: mercurial, quicksilver, her siren song luring Pikelet to perilous depths? The freedom bestowed by woman and water come at a cost, the longing to escape urging the boys on towards annihilation. Eros and Thanatos, desire and death, and all that. Water cinematographer Rick Rifici shows waves exploding into inverted mushroom clouds beneath the surface, sucking young limbs under with all the ocean’s wrath.
There’s divinity in the waves, too, which we know because a celestial beam literally parts the clouds to bless them. Breathtaking aerial shots of these boys in motion are the closest they’ll ever get to transcendence, captured with all the wonder of surf classics like Morning of the Earth (1972). Looking down the wave’s magnificent face, there’s genuine suspense when the boys’ skinny frames disappear into a curling barrel and we don’t yet know if they’ll emerge on the other side. “Never had I seen men do something so beautiful,” says Pikelet.
Breath charts the fork in Pikelet and Loonie’s road, where their lives could’ve taken a different turn if only somebody noticed them. Baker clearly sees grace in these lost boys, in their inchoate longings for something more. In his recent speeches Winton said that this is the first step towards dismantling toxic masculinity – to find such boys “worthy of our interest”. It’s ironic that when Baker does so, Eva is invariably drowned out.
Perhaps some books aren't meant to be adapted for the screen. Or at least not on your first attempt as a feature director.
Simon Baker is a renowned Australian actor best known for his work on US TV shows like The Mentalist and The Guardian, and somewhere in that busy schedule he's found time to hunker down with Tim Winton to adapt the author's Miles Franklin-winning novel Breath.
A perilous enterprise akin to riding the giant wave in the book, known as Old Smokey.
Breath is a layered, angular novel about small town boys growing up in 1970s South Western Australia who come under the spell of a Svengali-like surfing ace and his reclusive American wife.
Its first-person adult narrator offers a sober assessment of its events, in particular his first sexual experience and how it caused great psychological harm in successive years.
But the film — also co-written with Top of the Lake screenwriter Gerard Lee — eschews much of this emotional framework. It condenses the plot into a more straightforward coming-of-age tale about a sensitive teenager, Pikelet (Samson Coulter), his reckless, mop haired best friend Loonie (Ben Spence) and the glamorous but troubled hippy couple living on the edge of town — Sando and Eva — played by Baker himself and Elizabeth Debicki.
In the book, this pair are described with barely contained scorn by Winton — his deeply pragmatic, Christian worldview seemingly suspicious of their alternative spirituality and class privilege.
The critique is barely noticeable in the film.
Baker is a little too likeable to have a sinister side, perhaps, and lacks any alpha male menace, while Debicki isn't given the scope to fully develop what makes her so dark and damaged.
Only occasionally does the transposition from page to screen find transcendence in cinema's shorthand and dynamism.
A shot of Pikelet's father (Richard Roxburgh) watching his son dolefully from the back door, knowing he's losing him to Sando's surrogate figure, speaks as eloquently as any paragraph of prose.
The wave-riding sequences shot by water cinematographer Rick Rifici are also impressive, and even if the images of exquisitely curled waves and sublime underwater scapes aren't particularly original, their raw power has an undoubtable thrill.
The bro-triangle that develops out there between Pikelet, Loonie and Sando is held together by an instinctive respect and hierarchy, but it's also threatened by ego and rivalries, especially as Loonie's increasingly erratic bravado drives him further into the direction his name suggests.
But the real emotional curve ball of the story is thrown by Eva. (Spoiler ahead).
It's not something Winton foreshadows in the book, because he's more interested in power than eroticism, but Pikelet and Eva become lovers.
The film is faithful to this surprise turn, avoiding depicting chemistry brewing between them, which is a pity. It could have done with the momentum.
As it is, their torrid affair — whose perversion is symbolised in a sex game involving a red plastic bag that gives new meaning to the title — doesn't land with the crash it should.
Partly, it's down to Eva's underdrawn character.
Mostly, it's because the film doesn't translate the considerable time Winton spends describing how Pikelet sees her once they've become intimate: his desire for her, his indifference to her, his repulsion from her.
His confused viewpoint says a lot about his immaturity, and foreshadows the damage she will do.
It's a very difficult thing to peer inside the head of a character like a novelist does, and an inexperienced writer-director can't be blamed for coming up short.
Baker's film is however a perfunctory adaptation with only rare moments that shine.
The sophisticated ambivalence of the novel is lost in translation.
I didn't like the Jibe that the last one was though the read was good but its not everybody taste I'm not s surfer dude but I'm a fan of Simon so anything he does is alright with me.
News New Australian film Breath pulls more than $1m on opening weekend, can’t beat Avengers: Infinity War May 7, 2018
Australian film Breath finished its first weekend at the box office with more than $1m in earnings across 244 screens, coming in behind The Avengers: Infinity War and I Feel Pretty.
The film, an adaptation of Tim Winton’s novel Breath, finished at the weekend box office with $1.001m in earnings, just behind Amy Schumer’s film I Feel Pretty, which collected an additional $1.024m in its third weekend.
It might not be overstating it to suggest that Simon Baker has marked his directorial debut with an Australian classic.
Having not read the Tim Winton novel on which it is based (Cloudstreet was enough for me), I can’t comment on its faithfulness to the book, but Baker’s film, robust and tender, is a reminder that cinema can aspire to great art without he surf. Riding their bikes to the beach one day, they encounter the reclusive former champion boardrider Sando (Baker).
As Sando is at least twice their age and shacked up with Eva (Elizabeth Debicki), it could have been too much of a stretch to believe that he would be prepared to devote so much of his time to the boys. But he needs to be a guru to his acolytes as much as they are ripe for the lessons that he will impart to them. The other significant character in the drama is the ocean itself – and how beautifully shot it is by cameraman Rick Rifici.
Narrated by Pikelet the man in an elegiac voice (not unlike Gordie’s in Stand By Me), it is a coming-of-age story that digs deep into the male psyche, and heart. Pikelet (again, like Gordie) is sensitive and uncertain, not timid but also not prepared to indulge in the reckless bravado of his mate (and we have all knocked around with the appropriately named Loonie at some point).
The young actors are fantastic, as is Baker who plays it down in order to let them take centre stage. Eva is less clearly defined, but as the love-interest she is suitably ethereal and unknowable.
Complemented by Harry Gregson-Williams’s beautiful score, the period is perfectly captured (Pikelet asks his parents ‘can I please leave the table’ after he’s eaten his tea), as is the wonder and heavy portent of teenage years.
When a director can bring words of a novel to the screen and enchant the eye with images that could only be imagined from reading the novel, it is a tremendous escape. Director and Actor Simon Baker manages to give life for the big screen to Author Tim Winton’s award-winning novel, Breath. And what you have is a spectacular story so cleverly adapted for the screen with the visual splendour only a Winton novel and exceptional eye for detail from Baker’s direction could bring to life.
Set in a small coastal town in the 1970s are two young boys, the best of friends. One is quiet and calculated, Pikelet played by Samson Coulter. The other is loud and obnoxious, Loonie played by Ben Spence. Together they build their love for the ocean and start to learn to surf. After a chance meeting with an ex-pro surfer, Sando (Simon Baker) the boys take on some of the biggest waves that would frighten even the most expert of surfers.
With the different paths the boys start to take Sando and Loonie end up travelling through Indonesia while Pikelet is left on his own but not without company. Pikelet quickly starts to build an infatuation with Sando’s wife, Eva played by Elizabeth Debicki (Everest, The Night Manager, Guardians of the Galaxy 2). It doesn’t take long for the two to build a sexual relationship teaching Pikelet things he would never dream of.
First time film Director Simon Baker most known for his work as The Mentalist or The Guardian had his work cut out for him with Breath. Not only did Baker bring someone else’s written work to the screen he also had to convert what is a truly visual story to the extremes of the imagination. The visual splendour of this film is not one to be reckoned with. Thanks to the stunning coast line and town of Denmark in Western Australia, Baker was able to bring a whole new character to the screen alongside the talented actors.
While it was Baker’s first time directing, he was also having to direct first time actors Coulter and Spence. It is hard to think watching their performances on screen that they are anything but novices. Baker managed to tap into something with these boys and bring a unique naivety that might not have been possible with seasoned actors.
Samson Coulter despite surfing at elite levels managed to capture the character of Pikelet with absolute ease. There is one quote in the film & you’ve got this look. Like you’re expecting to lose something which absolutely nails Coulter’s performance. He is so far in his own head calculating every situation to the point he talks himself out of it. His performance is mesmerising to watch as he navigates adolescence and this crazy world of surfing and sexual awakening.
Ben Spence, another elite surfer played up to his character and utterly stole every scene he graced. From his opening few scenes his delivery and understanding of Loonie is frighteningly accurate. If he didn’t have you in stitches laughing because his lines were hilarious, it was his delivery of a simple line made side splitting hilarious. But beneath that is a very lost boy and what was interesting is he managed to hide it until he had these internal conflicts and you just caught a glimpse of what is going on in his head.
From the rugged bush landscape to the sweeping coast and amazing surf, Breath is a truly spectacular film. The story pulls you in and you don’t quite know where it will take you. As you find yourself immersed in the story line of each of the characters you are taken into another world. Watching the surf roll in, watching the rain poor throughout the bush you lose yourself in some pretty remarkable shots. The visual aspect of the film is ever as important as the story itself. It adds an entire new character that is so important to what it is the story is telling. Without something so special, you would be left with a film that doesn’t have any heart.
Overall this film is one truly special film to watch. While it does edge on the long side, it will encapsulate you and leave you with thoughts long after the film has ended. With the visual splendour of the ocean and coastal town it’s almost enough that you don't need the award-winning novel with its thick and juicy story lines to carry it through. But together they tell a simple story of life on the ocean and those crazy times in life where sometimes walking away is harder than following it through.
