juliet & juliet; finding common ground in a melodrama // 'breathe' (2014)

 It's a terribly difficult thing to try to straddle the line between good melodrama and allowing the viewer to feel that the stakes are low but virtually heightened. Romeo & Juliet does this so amazingly perfect, so much so that it transcends the genre and becomes a deep inward examination of heightened adolescent emotion. 

I'd like to say the same for 'Breathe' but that's where I'm cut short, knowing that it's not the same but finding it hard to explain why. I guess there's only one Bill. 

Perhaps there's a lack of personal experience here, blocking me from feeling the stakes, & inhabiting the mentality of the characters to take over me. After the screening, a classmate justified some actions taken in the film by saying 'well, she ruined her life.' It's at this impasse that I found my disconnect. She only feels like her life was ruined. In reality, we know that she actually has a very supportive group of friends, a loving parent, and a promising education in front of her and the ones mocking her at school are classless and dumb, people to be forgotten when the miasma of high school clears up in a couple of months. She has so much in front of her, that she's preparing for, before Sarah rips her into the now, the visceral. That's where Sarah lives, as she doesn’t see a future for herself, and she's determined to bring everyone else there as well. 

So what's the reason for the disconnect? Why doesn’t ‘Breathe’ fire those same synaptic pathways that some other young foolish love does for me? I believe it comes down to how well the film can rationalize or rather engross everything leading up to the snap. A successful denouement that lets you cross the line with the protagonist at some point but when you retrace your steps, the line of the sand is washed away. The high tide of passion overwhelming. A misplacement of Charlie’s heart, if you have the guts to stomach what happens next. Something irreversibly done that the red you see is enough to be acted on. Logic & Reason out the window. Fight or Flight, huh.

A flash of emotion, a killer ending.