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.