Beatrice goes underground
Breathing Under Water
Directed by Susan Murphy Dermody
Reviewed by Tracy Sorensen
Why on earth has humanity set the stage for its own extinction? In Breathing Under Water, the question is explored in a circular way rather than linear, engaging emotion and intuition rather than the intellect. Switch off the left side of your brain, and let it unfold.
The plot is minimal. Beatrice (Anne Louise Lambert) and her small daughter (played by Dermody's daughter Maeve) set out on a journey into the underworld, guided by a crumpled little map showing places like Pluto's Republic and Tom Tiddlers Ground (these are "explained" in a subconscious sort of way) and a dependable taxi driver in a woollen beanie (Kristoffer Greaves).
Their explorations are not something they do so much as things that open up for them to look at (thus, the acting is also minimal). Someone peers through a crack in a wall and suddenly we are watching black and white archival film of people shouting goodbye at a train station somewhere in Europe around the time of the second world war. This slithers into bright blue underwater photography of newborn babies swimming.
The film is at its most disturbing and exhilarating when the associations come freely: when spooky animated dream sequences flow into autopsy scenes and back again as the journey descends into Dantean ninth circle darkness.
But there is something annoying about our three companions/guides on this journey. Their presence and their reactions tend to mould and limit the reactions of the viewer: when we see something terrible through the microscope into which Beatrice is looking, we don't need to cut back to the look of horror on her face.
I found Dermody's representation of mother and child (both perfectly beautiful, innocent, well behaved) too assertively spelled out an essentialist reading: this is what a mother is, this is what the Earth is, this who and what ruined it. Which, unfortunately, cuts across a more generous spirit running through the film: inquiring, undirected and subtle.