Flight of the Red Balloon

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Flight of the Red Balloon is one of

those movies where nothing much happens. It’s a simple, relatively

peaceful film, notable in part because director Hou Hsao-Hsien is shooting outside Asia for the first

time. Hou’s starting point-dictated by Paris’s Musee d’Orsay, which commissioned the film-is La Ballon Rouge, the 1956

Albert Lamorisse film about a little boy and his companion in the streets of

Paris, a floating red balloon.


Hou’s on-screen surrogate for his entree

to Western filmmaking is Song, a

Chinese film student in Paris working as a nanny to a young boy, Simon.

(She’s also shooting a movie on the streets of Paris involving a red

balloon, and has Simon take part.) Simon’s

mother is Suzanne, played with great eccentricity and anxiousness by

Juliette Binoche, sporting a shock of blond hair atop an intense,

friendly but largely unhappy face. Suzanne works in a puppet theater (a

fairly explicit reference to one of Hou’s previous films, The

Puppetmasters) and lives alone with Simon in a cluttered

apartment. The place downstairs is hers, too, but the tenants-friends of her estranged husband-have stopped paying rent. She’s

eager to throw them out not only because she expects her older

daughter will soon need a place to stay in Paris, but also because

the couple is, to her mind anyway, ill-mannered, untidy, and

inconsiderate.

That’s it in a nutshell. Working to some degree in improvisational mode, Hou doesn’t

generate a lot of narrative, but his images-emphasizing the quality of

light passed through windows, or reflected in glass-are masterful and

riveting. At times the visual strategy reminded me of Kieslowski, but

then there’s something less structured and more free about Hou’s

style. Kieslowski’s French-language films were insistent in their

beauty, aggressive in their mystery. But nothing in Red Balloon

feels especially calculated, or even pre-meditated. Instead, Hou pulls

off the illusion that he’s just working the camera and the screen space

verité-style, trying to get the

best angle on Suzanne’s unfolding personal crisis, on Simon’s young

sense of

wonder, on Song’s tranquil face, lurking around the margins of every

scene, sometimes with a camcorder in hand-as always, the

filmmaker as tourist, spectator and eavesdropper. She’s also a

surrogate mother here: she’s shooting a film, on DV, about a red

balloon floating through the streets of Paris, and she has involved

Simon in the picture.

A quick glance around the net shows that

many viewers have been frustrated, angered even, by the film’s

languors. I can understand that it would seem little more than a pretty, exceptionally well-crafted trifle if

not for

the presence of Binoche, whose single mom is a credible, sympathetic

creation. It’s a

wholly un-selfconscious performance that sneaks up on you until Hou

and Binoche both let ‘er rip in a couple of key scenes where Suzanne

jabbers helplessly into her cell phone-that symbol of

simultaneous connectivity and disconnectedness-her feelings of

lonesomeness and abandonment palpable enough almost to transform Red

Balloon into tragedy.

But then there’s Simon, learning piano

and

growing street-smart, building up his understanding of the world

around him even as he wonders at the benevolence of the bright red

balloon that appears to him through a skylight in the film’s

concluding scene. For the balloon’s continued presence, he must have

Song to thank; she delivered an element of magic that Suzanne was

unequipped to provide. It’s a wonder that Suzanne surely

understands-she seems like the type to remember what it felt like to be

a child-even if she’s at an age where she knows a bit too much about

how the world works to share in that wonder. Flight of the Red Balloon is a little bit

happy and a little bit sad, a high-angle view on childhood in the

sunlight and adulthood in the shadows, with the much-longed-for consummation of the heart’s yearnings

floating on the breeze just out of reach.

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