Karl Markovics is the Austrian actor known best for his leading role in 2007 Oscar winner The Counterfeiters, in which he played a Jewish forger, imprisoned in a Nazi camp and forced to take part in a scheme to flood Allied economies with fake banknotes. Now Markovics has made his debut as a writer and director, and it is tremendously impressive: starkly lit and alertly composed and controlled in the Austrian style of Haneke, Hausner et al, but also with a sense of warmth and redemptive purpose that is more like the British social realists. Markovics may conceivably have been inspired by The Son, by Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne.
Roman Kogler, played by Thomas Schubert, is a teenage boy who grew up in an orphanage and is now a convicted criminal, imprisoned in a very grim juvenile-detention centre. He is pursuing parole applications, which depend very much on his being able to hold down a job, for which he would be allowed out daily. Finally, Roman gets work as a municipal mortuary attendant, in which – to his suppressed horror and disgust – he has to handle corpses. His co-workers are bored bullies, very like his prison warders. Yet Roman must endure this job if he is to get parole, and must each day take the subway train before dawn into Vienna, and alight just where a horribly ironic holiday ad says: "Dive into adventure".
One day, a chance discovery triggers a crisis of self-examination in Roman, and also brings in its train a real insight. We are shown that Roman's job, so far from being the lowest of the low, is in some ways privileged. He must attend people at the moment of gravest crisis and greatest, most naked humanity. Roman and his deadpan colleagues enact secret rituals and observances. There is a poignant fascination in their having to dress the body of a naked old woman in her bedroom, while her traumatised daughter-in-law waits outside, tearfully unable to face the reality of death.
The "breathing" of the title becomes a cleverly recurrent motif, and Markovics's script circles around the themes of death and life in thoughtful and elegant ways: it is a well-carpentered screenplay which bears every sign of having been a labour of love, worked on fruitfully over many years.
