PARK CITY — Drake Doremus, the director of Sundance hit “Like Crazy,” which earned two top awards here two years ago before flopping in general release, somewhat repeats himself with the quiet, gentle but deeply felt love story “Breathe In,” but this companion piece is nearly as effective and touching as the earlier one.
As in “Like Crazy,” the superb Felicity Jones plays a British student (then she was in college, now she’s back to high school) who comes to the States to draw out a soulful creative American. This time she’s an exchange student staying with fellow student Lauren (Mackenzie Davis) and her parents (Amy Ryan and Guy Pearce).
Pearce, one of the most reliable actors around, is stellar as the dad, an introverted cello player turned high-school music teacher who has been living his life under a cloud of silent regret. He got married, had a child and so left New York City to move to a distant, sleepy suburb up the Hudson River. But at the moment he’s up for a chair in an orchestra, and if he passes the audition he can quit his unchallenging teaching job and finally begin his life as an artist. Also, now that the family’s daughter is grown he’d like to move back to the city but his wife is perfectly content where she is.
The way Keith (Pearce) won’t even look at Sophie (Jones) when the family picks her up at the airport guarantees that sparks will fly between these two, though there are the usual preliminaries in which the two of them are at cross purposes. Sophie, who plays the piano, initially refuses to participate in his music class. But when she finally plays (a Chopin warmup piece), Keith discovers she’s no ordinary student. And the two begin to discover that they have a lot in common.
The story is familiar enough, and the tone is very much that of the dreamy “Like Crazy,” but writer-director Doremus has a gift for making the quiet moment resonate, harvesting all the emotional energy in a longing glance or a pregnant sigh. Jones’s delicate, luminous face makes her the perfect muse for him. The scene that gives the film its title, in which Sophie gets Keith to calm down before an audition by simply sitting down and breathing, is powerful in its unexpected simplicity. If Doremus is going to keep making lovely little movies about exquisite heartache, I’ll happily keep watching.