This rare French entry asks a little too much of its viewers.
First off, people with respiratory issues shouldn’t see this movie. I was very conscious of my breathing during and after watching it.
Now then: A divorced dad, Mathieu, returns home to Paris from an ostensible business trip to Canada. In reality, he’s been researching experimental treatments for his tween daughter Sarah, who has a disease that requires her to live in a “bubble” in her mom’s walk-up apartment. When he stops in to tell his ex-wife, Anna, about this new possibility, she hits the roof—they’ve been OVER this. He leaves, frustrated.
Back at his own apartment, Matheiu sees a breaking news story about earthquakes in Denmark and Sweden. Seconds afterward, his apartment shakes and the power goes out. Sarah’s bubble immediately goes to battery backup power. Mathieu has gone out to the street to look around, when suddenly…
The sirens go off and yellow-brown, dirty-looking fog starts to seep up out of the sewers. Then there’s an apparent eruption of the fog, killing people along the way. Mathieu runs for Anna and Sarah’s apartment, which is on a higher floor than his. But the fog continues to rise, and rise, and… Sarah is safe in her battery-powered bubble, but Mathieu and Anna must run to the top floor in her building and take refuge with the elderly couple who live there. The fog’s level ends up being just below their floor. If you’re thinking to yourself, “gases don’t work like that,” you’re right. Strike one.
They eventually decide to go to a nearby medical facility and get a hazmat-type suit for Sarah, and oxygen masks for themselves, and get out of Paris. Why they think that the fog hasn’t expanded laterally, I can’t tell you. Through a convoluted series of VERY improbable events—including a neighbor who uses an oxygen tank who’s conveniently dead, a scooter that gets noticed JUST IN TIME and not a minute before, biology that strains credulity, and walking right by a hazmat suit that might have saved a life later in the film—we get to the twist ending, which is nonsensical to the point of absurdity. I understand that the director was probably going for a metaphor, but I can’t imagine what it might be. We’re leaving our children a polluted world, but they’re going to thrive? They’ll turn the tables on the adults eventually?
Visually, the movie has impressive moments, especially the fog-covered rooftops of Paris. Notre Dame makes an appearance, which must seem bittersweet now. The director also makes copious use of bird’s-eye viewpoint shots, which I’m sure ties in to the mystery metaphor. The acting is also good, given what they’ve got to work with. And the music is evocative without being intrusive, for the most part.
A Breath Away was nominated for this year’s Canadian Screen Awards for directing, sound, supporting actor, and best picture, but has won only one award: the Cheval Noir (Dark Horse) prize given at the 2018 Fantasia Film Festival.
The original French title, Dans la brume, literally translates to In the Fog/Mist. I guess the studio didn’t want people mixing it up with Gorillas in the Mist? Or John Carpenter’s The Fog? In the latter case, especially, the comparison would only hurt this film. Such a disappointment.
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A Breath Away (orig. Dans la brume), 89 minutes
Not rated
Directed by Daniel Roby
Written by Guillaume Lemans, Jimmy Bemon, Mathieu Delozier
Featuring Romain Duris, Olga Kurylenko, Fantine Harduin
[…] handy as they try to escape the mist. Now that I’m typing this, it sounds an awful lot like Dans la brume, only […]