The Air I Breathe (U.S.A.)
World Premiere




written and directed
by Jieho Lee

Based on a Chinese proverb, these four overlapping stories dramatize the four emotional cornerstones of life: happiness, pleasure, sorrow and love, or so says the blurb, but these actually two narratives, which are shoehorned into each other at the end, and not too well either. It took five years for Jieho Lee and Bob DeRosa to get this film on film, and it doesn't seem like all that time and effort was worth it.

The film starts rather promisingly. Titled Happiness, it's about an investment counselor(Forest Whitaker) who hears about a fixed race and decides to go to an illegal OTB parlor and bets a huge amount he doesn't have on the horse, which unexpectedly loses. Here he meets the main character of the film, a crime boss named Fingers(Andy Garcia), who explains how he got the nickname and gives him a couple of weeks to get the money he owes. A bank robbery is staged and it all ends badly, but our hero achieves the title of his segment.

The second segment, entitled Pleasure, is about Fingers' assistant (Brendan Fraser), who we see briefly in the first segment and has the gift of prophecy. Fingers assigns him to look after his nephew(Emile Hirsch), and for some reason he loses his gift, and somehow this gives him the title emotion. So far, so good, but then the thing begins to fall apart.

In part three: Sorrow, Trista, a pop star (Sarah Michelle Gellar) discovers to her horror that her manager has gambled away all her money and that she's now his slave. Falling in love with Brenden Frasier…the whole thing starts to lose steam, and this isn't Geller's fault, it's purely that of the writers, because the characters are flat. The fourth segment, Love involves a doctor (Kevin Bacon) who needs Trista because she has an extremely rare mutant blood type. It's grasping at straws, and gets more pathetic by the minute, and the ending is just plain bad.

There's no mystery as to why this took so long, what the mystery is is how it managed to make it onto the screen at all. Don't bother.
 

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