Is Eva pitiable, or hard-hearted, or both? Debicki communicates a kind of impenetrable sorrow – and the unmistakable feeling that something inside Eva is dead or dying.

Her character is gradually filled in and Debicki’s excellent, shrewdly distanced performance becomes increasingly nuanced. For the boys she is a confusing erotic presence: too old to be a conventional love interest too young to be their mother. The same cannot be said, in terms of surrogate parentage, of Sando’s partner, Eva (Elizabeth Debicki), a former competitive skier from the US. As in Winton’s novel, the parents of each boy are present but relegated to the story’s peripheries, adding to the sense of Sando being a fatherly role model. Their friendship with Sando (Baker) begins when the older, wiser, freewheeling surfer gives them a lift. Pikelet and Loonie, circa the mid-1970s, buy crappy surfboards and take to the water.

So much so that Breath feels almost like a chamber piece, the largeness of the ocean an alternative to boxed-in settings and closed spaces. That chapter is jettisoned and a Wonder Years-like narration (voiced by Winton himself) is introduced, complementing the film’s visual melancholia with a wistful sense of perspective.įor the most part Baker focuses on a small number of intensely drawn characters. This was hinted at from the start of the novel on which Breath is based, in which Tim Winton – the Australian literary world’s pre-eminent “poet of the beach” – introduced an ambulance man, whose latest traumatic job triggered memories of his childhood, setting the tone for the rest of the story.

Tim winton breath book