Friday 25 January 2008

Breaking Away

There's something deeply honest and cinematically gorgeous about Peter Yate's 'Breaking Away'(1979). The close shot of the father startled by his son's progression into adulthood is a classic moment of resolution and hope,tinged with humour and that tingling sense of a continuing story.As a child the experience of cinemagoing was always enlivened by the ability to wait in your seat and rejoin the film as it played for the next showing. This sense of 'knowing' the characters and their world and greeting them like old friends is lost in today's screen(screaming?) universe where people leave before the credits are complete and shuffle away from the final scene as if leaving an accident site.
'Breaking Away' has a wholeness and sense of audience involvement at its heart that still touches ,particularly in its presentation of a father and son relationship. The exploration of the father's journey - his returning to 'cut' stone and connect with his own past being an essential part of the film's back story/backbone.I guess it will struggle for an audience over time,however if you have yet to see it then make that time.It will reconnect for you,too.Plus you get to see the young Dennis Quaid and Daniel Stern wisecracking away the pain of adolescence pretending it doesn't hurt......

What is striking about the film now is its 

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