Some sports activities are extra about transcendence than splashy thrills.
This text is a part of our 2023 Sundance Movie Competition protection. Comply with alongside as we try the movies and filmmakers showing on the first fest of the brand new 12 months. On this entry, Farah Cheded opinions Laura McGann’s The Deepest Breath.
The query nagging on the edges of each excessive sports activities documentary is an easy one. Why? What precisely do these athletes get out of their death-defying stunts that makes the dangers they take value it? Set on the planet of freedivers — athletes who dive as deep as they will on solely a single breath — Laura McGann’s The Deepest Breath provides an sudden reply to that query in its very first minutes.
The movie opens on land, with a short clip of Italian champion Alessia Zecchini telling an interviewer that she’s neither afraid of nor thinks a lot about demise. Then, the movie plunges with Alessia into her watery area. We watch as she glides balletically downward towards the underside of the Atlantic Ocean. Although she is sustained by simply two lungfuls of oxygen, there isn’t a signal of stress or effort in her actions as as a substitute they’re sleek, serene, and pure.
The footage — actual, shot as a part of official proceedings for Vertical Blue, an elite free-diving competitors — is about to the steadily slowing thump of a heartbeat. Collectively, the tranquillity of those hypnotic sounds and pictures attune us to the wavelength of free-divers like Alessia, wordlessly demonstrating why they stretch the bounds they do. There’s a particular peace to be discovered down there, within the blue abyss that Alessia calls “the final quiet place on Earth,” and by holding your breath “you get to grasp much more about your self.”
It’s an enchanting subversion of our expectations that these excessive athletes would possibly, the truth is, be anti-adrenaline junkies, in search of quiet transcendence relatively than splashy thrills. However as a substitute of trusting that audiences may be drawn into the deep of its story by the identical pursuit, The Deepest Breath believes the other — that it should manufacture a histrionic sense of foreboding to maintain us watching.
We all know that tragedy is on the horizon from the ominous point out of demise within the movie’s opening scene, and we quickly see how shut Alessia involves paying that stark value for her pursuit of final solitude. When she lastly breaks the floor after that first serene dive, the class of her actions underwater abruptly contorts into panic. Her limbs flail, her mouth spits frantically, her eyes roll towards the sky. A security diver grabs her spasming head and crops his lips on hers to ship a kiss of life.
The Deepest Breath freezes on this second, shrewdly enjoying on the bodily intimacy required by that life-saving act to trace at what’s to come back between Alessia and the opposite diver, Stephen. We spend the following hour or so following the paths that lead them independently to that climactic second within the ocean collectively. Stephen, an Irish adventure-seeker, discovered his approach into freediving through gorilla treks in Congo and detours within the desert, whereas Alessia, a former youngster prodigy within the sport, all the time knew she was destined for it. Each journeys are compelling in their very own proper.
It’s thrilling and galvanizing to observe a pre-teen Alessia over the hurdles posed by her gender and age, and there’s a lot to be moved by in Stephen’s personal pursuit of goal. However these insights into what pulls folks into the deep are continuously dulled by The Deepest Breath’s narrative insecurity. The movie typically defaults to an ominous framing, making fixed, brooding cuts to speaking heads who remind us of the chance of freak accidents and the value of insatiable ambition. These alarm bells are additional amplified by the onscreen absence of Alessia or Stephen for a lot of the movie — a conceit that rings just a little manipulative by the point the credit roll.
As a result of we’re by no means allowed to bask untroubled within the wondrous points of the story for lengthy, The Deepest Breath struggles to match the revelatory depths of its first moments. There are some glints of transcendence, although. When a bereaved father speaks of being a lot consoled in his grief by the way in which his youngster lived their life, it’s not possible to not be struck by how selfless and buoyant his perspective is. And when Alessia, afraid of the darkish, speaks of being soothed by the notice of Stephen’s presence within the murky depths together with her, the movie opens up, permitting us to really feel a few of the supernatural energy of their bond.
There are related pearls to be present in Tim Cragg’s cinematography, too. Largely composed of archival competitors footage and vlogs shot by the divers themselves, The Deepest Breath additionally options some authentic visible materials. Alongside flashy Nat Geo-style photographs, one hypnotic reconstruction of a dive underscores the religious pull the ocean has for these athletes. On this scene, the digicam follows a diver down earlier than rotating 180 levels to make it seem like they’re floating upwards, as in the event that they’re hovering up in holy rapture. Julian Hart’s edits might be simply as wordlessly eloquent, too. When the display screen freezes on Stephen’s kiss of life within the movie’s intro, for instance, it isn’t only a sign for the romance to come back. It additionally hints at one thing loftier even than real love, and affirms the movie’s simmering theme — that there’s nothing so intimate as saving one other particular person’s life.
Whereas its energy is commonly dampened by narrative insecurity, The Deepest Breath manages to remain afloat thanks to those hovering moments and the emotion inherent to its story. Though it holds its breath an excessive amount of to let it get very far out of the shallows, the story at its coronary heart is undeniably compelling, and so the movie manages to drag off the identical sleight of hand freediving does: luring us in with the promise of high-octane thrills, however in the end leaving an influence deeper than a fast spike of adrenaline.
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