Breath (Soom)

“Breath” (2007), the most recent film by the Korean director Kim Ki-Duk, is a mesmerizing universe of creation and destruction entwining the literal and the symbolic with a vitality at once organically whole and serenely shattered. It is the tale of the fated meeting of a man and a woman.

He is a prisoner on death row for having murdered his wife and two young daughters, motive unknown, though it may be suspected that the brutality of his action is meant to spare them something about the horror of existence as he has come to glimpse it. For this condemned man his creative, impulsive and agonizingly repeated suicide attempts are, contextually, his only way of delaying the day of his execution: he must first recover sufficiently for the authorities to feel satisfied that full payment for his horrible crime can be exacted. Indeed, he cannot be allowed to usurp the state’s sovereign power and authority.

Unbeknownst to him there is someone he needs to meet who needs, equally, to meet him. She is a young housewife, sculptor and mother. With the discovery of her husband’s infidelity her world, or rather the tenuous illusion of life created by the rhythms and patterns of diligent hard work and devotion to her art and family, has shattered, awakening her from the dream of repeated gesture. Her husband’s affair is never more than a side issue; through the sensational televised accounts of the prisoner’s suicide attempts she has found the man she needs to encounter and is compelled by an inner necessity to seek him out .

Without knowing why, she follows the path that leads to the prison gate where she spontaneously claims to be the prisoner’s ex-girlfriend, thereby hoping to gain entry. Refused, she turns but cannot leave- she knows she must meet this man.

The surveillance camera hones in on her puzzled expression. The unseen Seer, presumably the prison Warden, phones the gatekeeper with the surprising counter-command of her permission to enter.

Kim exquisitely portrays the idiosyncratic complexity of even the most regimented authority: in absolute single-mindedness it can afford to be peripherally promiscuous. Clearly, she will not and cannot hinder the bureaucratic agenda and, perhaps, her influence, whoever she is, will help the prisoner to recover and desist in his suicide attempts. In so doing she will abet the authority’s desire, intention and duty; whatever else may or may not be accomplished is of no consequence, being outside the purview of official interest.

In the small stark visiting room she is inspired to tell of a childhood experience shared with two girlfriends; a dare to see who could hold their breath the longest under water without panicking, i.e. who could best tolerate the pull into unconsciousness without succumbing to fear and returning to ordinary breathing, to ordinary consciousness. What lived on in her from this early memory was the vague yet potent awareness of how it feels to be fully alive. Awakened from her transfixed state, she reconnects at a depth level to being alive, an impossibility without the specter of death and loss being present.

Though she has never forgotten this powerful moment only now does she come to understand that she has been living out the same long breathless moment in her upstairs apartment. Unconnected to the realities of her husband, child and work, she is not successful in any of these realms; her attitude and inclination are academic and perfunctory, if prodigious and sincere. The prisoner is all passionate action without the ability to listen, to let life take its own course; she is all endurance, discernment and dedication, without access to urgency.

Their meeting results in the magnificent creation of a series of performances that she enacts on subsequent visits, symbolic embodiments of the seasons- one full year- in costume, song and mise-en-scene. The small visiting room’s confining walls are visually pried open, figuratively eclipsed, with a wallpaper collage of bright flowers and green fields as she sings and dances a jubilant traditional ode to springtime that is both forthright and modest. As the prisoner is taken away, she gives him a photograph of herself as a young girl. Summer is brash and brassy with walls of brilliant blue sky and a coquettish rendering of teenage desire punctuated with a darting kiss.

Autumn is wistful and reflective, crowded with the burnt golds and deep reds of experience, memory and change. The accompanying photograph is a nude self-portrait, her body delicately coiled like the wrapping of a gift, her face entirely open and revealing. Finally, in winter, without scenery or song and barely sheathed in a black dress of mourning, there is a full erotic coming together at the end of which she seeks via an unbroken “taking the breath away” kiss to discover whether he is now ready to let go of life, no longer fighting for the next breath.

What is the underlying nature of their exchange? It is nothing less than a mutual initiatory experience. As a girl she did not permit her father’s beatings to destroy her need to draw, yet, as an adult- despite a fidelity to hard work at her art- could not resist the lure to buffer herself from darkness with the trappings of a normal life. She grasps that without a guiding passion commitment is merely the repetition of forms of existence. He, through the magic of her feminine heroism, which insists its way into his overly masculine, action-addicted psyche, apprehends why he has not been able to let go of life and surrender to his sentence. Before his encounter with her, his life would end incomplete.

Unlike her husband, who is genuinely able to find solace – though not passionate connection- through playing the “Moonlight Sonata”, and daughter who, at least for now, finds sufficient room to resonate within popular culture, the woman and the prisoner have not been able to find complete expression within the boundaries of collective existence. Theirs is a call to discover an aspect of existence and self that has been walled off- unwelcomed, unintegrated- and instinctively each fights in his and her own way to stay alive while there still remains a moment of hope for release from one-sidedness.

The psyche seeks the experience of wholeness; in this sense life is the preparatory journey towards the right death, as, incrementally, fulfilled experience is the path into greater living. Lucky are those who have heard the voice of life and fellow travelers in time to take up the right challenge. For most, like the prisoner, word comes too late for here and now remedy, another chance, but the symbolic realm allows the geometry of completion even after life has laid down its seemingly inexorable account.

He who has now been subjected to the power of feminine will calling the masculine out of its isolation is prepared for the release into death. She who has witnessed her potency in action can return to husband and daughter with the free gift of herself. No one will ever again circumscribe her need to live fully. She has had the revelation that living is her art, that her sculpture expressed a modest talent, not a calling. Whatever life next asks of her she will hear. The sounds of her shattered sculpture hammered into bits are her commitment to faith in herself.