Breathe

A French film set in a high school. Charlie is seventeen. She has asthma, her parents are separating and at school she is a quiet student. Someone new arrives in the class. Sarah is confident, talkative and noticed; she says her mother works in Africa. The two become close fast. For Charlie the friendship becomes the centre of everything; a holiday spent together, shared rooms, the same jokes. Then something changes. Sarah pulls back, turns to other people and begins to humiliate Charlie. She does it not openly but in ways everyone can see and nobody can name. What the film is interested in is not love or jealousy but the power one person builds over another, and the narrative advances that slowly and plausibly. The asthma is not a coincidence. Shortness of breath, a closing throat and panic run alongside the whole emotional line. What the ending is will not be written here; in its final minutes the narrative changes tone completely. Joséphine Japy plays Charlie and Lou de Laâge plays Sarah. Isabelle Carré is in the cast. The source is a novel by Anne-Sophie Brasme. Mélanie Laurent directed; she is known as an actor and this is one of her films behind the camera. Who it is for: anyone who likes adolescent drama and stories of toxic friendship. Who it is not for: anyone looking for an easy watch; the film keeps raising the tension and its ending is hard.