Breath Themes

“Ordinary” and “extraordinary” become watchwords for the central characters in Breath, motivating their increasingly reckless stunts while simultaneously shadowing them with anxiety. In the rugged Western Australian countryside of the 1970s, teenage friends Bruce and Loonie are drawn first to the sport of surfing, and then to the mysterious elder surfing master Sando, for the escape from their ordinary lives that both represent. Sando makes the binary explicit one day when he tells…

Breath probes the limits of peril to which people will subject themselves in search of an ecstatic thrill. Its principal characters are united by a certainty that only when one is closest to death does one feel truly alive. From surfing giant waves to freestyle ski jumping to

, the element of fear is central to the ecstasy these life-threatening experiences provide. While Bruce is relatively open about his anxieties about risky situations, Loonie looks…

Like many classic coming-of-age tales, Breath depicts the interplay between external influences and internal realizations in the crucial transitional years of adolescence. Bruce’s initial encounter with Loonie catalyzes his transition from being a solitary child to an energetic young teenager. Adults are not very present in the boys’ lives, and they are thus responsible for one another’s growth, even though they are both equally clueless about the world. Their constant daring of one another…