resurfacing

by Douglas Messerli

Harm van der Sanden (screenwriter and director) Breathe / 2022 [7 minutes]

For a number years now I have been noticing a strange tic in gay "coming out" and other gay movies. Whenever the young hero is faced with a dilemma regarding his sexuality, he immediately enters the bathroom and splashes water upon his face. You might almost describe the act as an emblem to the film’s audience, as if we might not have otherwise imagined it, that the young man is going through an inner crisis.

      Another such emblem is to have the young adolescent suffering his crisis while immersed in a bathtub or a swimming pool. Water appears to have become the new symbol of problem solving or at least the demand to face up to the truth.

     In Breathe, 42-year-old Netherlands director Harm van der Sanden has decided to utterly immerse his central figure Bram (played at various ages by Freek Buikema, Joshua Bos, and Robert Kalter) as well as much of his movie under water, backing up the proof that Bram undergoing a serious crisis with mountain waterfalls and other flowing bodies of the liquid substance.   

     While under water, so to speak, this film still manages to tell a lovely narrative of two young schoolboys Bram and Devin (a role shared by Benjamin Mukadi Kanda van de Kamp and Shaquille Jacott) as they progress from elementary school boys clearly head-over-heels in love best friends to high school buddies and slightly removed colleagues.

      As a child Bram shows all the signs of being gay, in grade school drawing a beautiful picture of himself and his friend hand-in-hand wandering into the sunset, a very troubling image for his teacher (Anne Rats), whether because of the racial disparity or the queer quotient we can’t quite tell.

 

     Like many a young boy, we see Bram, as he witnesses ballerinas performing on stage, a moment when he naturally imitates their en pointe spins, his friend standing by with a smile on his face.

     But things gradually change. Bram begins to play football with the other boys. Although he gazes longingly at one moment at Devin, the next moment he catches the eye of a young girl who we later see him kissing.

     The football games become more and more intense. In another moment we see him in a studio sketching a picture of Devin while the other’s attention is focused of the female model. But soon after Bram’s art becomes more abstract. The boys are obviously going in their own directions, Bram moving toward the heterosexual and perhaps racial "norm."

      During all of this Bram takes plunges at various ages into his tub, spending long moments under water apparently trying to think things out—perhaps without a breath, not succeeding too well.

      We observe a mature Bram painting one of his more abstract images with an equally grown-up Devin in the background, basically being ignored. Devin prepares to move on, leaving behind for his friend a tube containing within a gift.

      Noticing his departure, Bram picks up the tube, opens it and discovers the colorful drawing of the two of which he had been so proud in grade school, until his teacher face turned from joy into a worried frown.

        The bathing Bram comes up for air.