DVD Review
Film: The Air I Breathe
Studio: NALA films
Director: Jieho Lee
Principal actors: Andy Garcia, Brendan Fraser, Forest Whitaker, Kevin Bacon, Sarah Michelle Gellar,
Release date: January 25, 2008 (limited); May 20, 2008 (on DVD)
Film length: 95 min
Rating: R

 

Christine Lee (Vancouver Correspondent - Canada)

Based on a Chinese proverb stating that human existence is made up of Happiness, Pleasure, Sorrow and Love, The Air I Breathe explores the fateful connection between four different people each representing one of the emotional elements. Happiness is played by 2006 Best Actor Oscar Winner Forest Whitaker; a repressed and unfulfilled business worker who lives a monotonous life with a routine 9 to 5 job. Upon overhearing his colleagues' conversation about a rigged horse race, Happiness impulsively bets all his money but ends up losing everything. Now at the mercy of debt ruthless crime boss Fingers (Oscar-nominee Andy Garcia), Happiness robs a bank out of out reckless desperation and experiences a thrill and happiness at the most unexpected moment.

Pleasure (Brendan Fraser) is Finger's right hand hit man who possesses the psychic ability to see into the future. Haunted by the death of his childhood friend, Pleasure sees himself as a mere witness to future events and powerless to change what will happen. While taking Finger's obnoxious nephew Tony (Emile Hirsch) out on his rounds, Pleasure sees a vision of how the night will unfold and yet what happens is contrary to his expectations. That moment of realization that the future can be changed becomes his closest experience of pleasure.

Sorrow (Sarah Michelle Gellar), known to the world as Trista, is a rising superstar who hides her vulnerability behind her name and fame. Trista crosses paths with Fingers and Pleasure after her manager sells Fingers her management contract to pay off his debt. Pleasure is drawn to Trista, a girl whose future he cannot see and who understands his feelings of helplessness as her father was killed in a car accident before her eyes as a child. Pleasure and Trista's love affair has tragic consequences after Fingers discovers that Pleasure has been hiding Trista from him.

Love, played by Kevin Bacon, is a doctor in a desperate situation to save his best friend's wife (Julie Delpy) after she has been bitten by a poisonous snake and he discovers that she has an extremely rare blood type. Love randomly sees an interview on television where Trista mentions she has the same rare blood type and rushes to Trista's concert just as Trista is planning to run away from Fingers. In the end it is Trista's blood that saves the love of his life, a woman Love can never hope to have. 

Through these four seemingly distinct yet connected stories, debuting director/writer Jieho Lee twists our conventional ideas of Happiness, Pleasure, Sorrow and Love. We do not usually think of people in desperate and dangerous situations as experiencing happiness, pleasure and love and yet all four characters symbolize one of these emotions and experience the other characters' emotions intensely under situations bordering life and death.  

The surprising connection between Happiness and Sorrow revealed at the end of the movie, along with the intimate relationship between Pleasure and Sorrow as well as Sorrow's role in saving Love's beloved, serve to illustrate Ward Beecher's epigram at the beginning of the movie: "No emotion, anymore than a wave, can long retain its own individual form". The Air I Breathe is a circular movie revealing that each emotion is necessary for us to understand and appreciate other emotions and attempts to show how the lines between these emotions are often blurred. While The Air I Breathe can be seem as a typical gangster movie with a bit too many coincidences, it is an ambitious attempt on Lee's part to explore the meaning of life and human existence through the overlap of human emotions and overall I would say he has been quite successful.