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.