CINEMA: The Air I Breathe

In the last few years Crash has been the best exponent of the ‘separate strands’ storyline movie with an ensemble cast, where everything comes together in the last scene. Now we get The Air I Breathe, a movie with the all-encompassing ambitions of Crash, but without the depth or intelligent script.

Based on an Asian proverb, which breaks life down into the four emotions of happiness, sorrow, pleasure and love, we have the banker with gambling debts (Forest Whitaker) who is forced to turn to robbery to keep a crime boss (Andy Garcia) off his back; the boss’s enforcer (Brendan Fraser) who falls for a would-be pop starlet (Sarah Michelle Geller); and a doctor (Kevin Bacon) who falls in love with his best friend’s wife (Julie Delpy). All their stories come together in a not-quite-believable fashion simply because the links between them are tenuous in the extreme.

Of the actors it is Brendan Fraser as the world-weary, fatalistic enforcer who takes the honours and his sequence, which forms the film’s backbone, is definitely the best. But there is something very amateur about the film’s execution and the separate elements never feel harmonious. Maybe if director Jieho Lee had concentrated solely on Brendan Fraser’s story, the film would have had more integrity and cohesion.      Dee Pilgrim