Avis des critiques

The film zeroes in on the girlish longing to be wholly made over—to be rescued from potentially lifelong ordinariness by a less fearful, more charismatic friend, a woman for whom everything is effortless. As such, Breathe belongs to a subset of films that couch female friendship's complexity in the sensationalism of melodrama and horror.

The sexual hysteria of Blue is the Warmest Color is certainly abundant in Laurent's film, but without the overt eroticism. Instead, her characters ooze feelings through whispers and stoic glares until their plausibility as friends evaporates as quickly as a teenager's attention span.

Laurent, who adapted wunderkind author Anne-Sophie Brasme's bestselling, and controversial, 2001 French novel, published when the author was only 17, has crafted a startling cinematic companion to Brasme's original elegy to girlhood.

Cinema is filled with stories of intense and manipulative female friendships, friendships that sometimes tip over into folie a deux situations... Women will stab you in the back. Women will steal your husband. Women will start gossip campaigns to destroy your reputation. Laurent knows all that, but never lets her story derail into cliche. This is well-observed stuff, the hysteria of a new friendship, and the moments when the abyss opens up, yawning underneath what once seemed perfect.

Charlie and Sarah fit the tropes of virgin and vamp, respectively, but Laurent brings welcome subtlety to their relationship, shooting them in close quarters as they do teen girl stuff... More than once, the film spells out its themes of passion and obsession through literal classroom lessons, such as an overheard science video discussing plants that need to be in close proximity to survive. Such heavy-handedness though, is not Breathe's default mode of expression.

It's perhaps no surprise that Laurent, who could probably have played Sarah herself a decade ago, gets superb performances from her two young leads. Her formal control is nearly as strong—so much so that what appears to be a rookie mistake at one crucial point (abruptly abandoning the film's well-established point of view for what looks like a clumsy exposition dump) is ultimately revealed, at the end of a long tracking shot, to be a devastating coup de cinéma.

A bold, brilliant acted study of adolescence, French director Mélanie Laurent's second feature Breathe is riveting from beginning to end. Tracing a friendship from its initial euphoric harmony to sadistic betrayal and horrific tragedy, the film is not only a bracing antidote to mindless entertainments about teenage libidos but is virtually a clinical profile of a psychological stage defined by many professionals as a borderline condition.

It's a chilly, elegantly assured little picture, a horror story with its roots not in fantasy but in the reality of hurt feelings... Laurent has sympathy for them both. Even though we can spot the cracks in Sarah's façade right away, we're seduced by her too; Charlie, on the other hand, lacks energy and fire. No wonder she turns to Sarah for everything she lacks, and no wonder Sarah clings to her for stability.

Once Sarah's antics become so unbearable that Charlie is repeatedly unable to breathe, it's clear that nuance has finally lost the battle with literalism... So it's in fact the perils of linear plotting that become Breathe's true moral: When you're forced to draw a straight line between two identical points, there's never going to be much room for shading.

As the two friends' relationship begins to deteriorate, Laurent's carefully weighed naturalism awkwardly takes on the trappings of a horror film. The tonal shift is unexpected and yields operatic exchanges, such as a party scene in which Sarah threatens to kill Charlie if she reveals her carefully hidden secret. Even for a tale of untamed teenage obsession, Laurent's psychological study loses its nuances once Sarah's narcissistic perversion turns into mere provocation.

The small but impressive triumph of "Breathe" is how much it makes us feel complicit in Charlie and Sarah's claustrophobic codependency... Laurent demonstrates a vivid sense memory for the circumscribed world of adolescence and its outsized feelings of jealousy and heartbreak and alienation (from family/friends/self) — feelings that flow through "Breathe" as though Laurent herself were there only yesterday.