Le Voyage du Ballon Rouge (The Flight of the Red Balloon)

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  November 6, 2009

  EarthlyAlien

  "Balloon, are you coming or not?"
  
  Paris (and France in general) tends to be a habitat seen in big sweeps and large outside shots, attesting to the ongoing American romanticizing of the City of Lights. The Eiffel Tower looming large in the background, the stoic Arc de Trio...( read more)mphe, the rolling lawns in front of the Basilique du Sacré-Coeur: However intimate the city's candour might be, Film has always taken Paris in with its monuments, landmarks, and open spaces as pieces of a collective familiarity.
  
  
  
  With the exception of a lone, beautiful coda within the Musée d'Orsay, the very body responsible for the film's funding, Hou Hsiao-hsien's gorgeous Flight of the Red Balloon drifts away from these environs, making a film about Paris life that seems uninterested in Paris as a city. Based on, or perhaps just familiarized with, Albert Lamorisse's French children's classic, Hsiao-hsien moves the focus from a child and his balloon to a child, his frazzled mum, and his new Chinese nanny, a young filmmaker on a student visa.
  
  In an odd act of attentiveness, the nanny, Song (a great Song Fang), begins to make a student film about the red balloon floating around her arondissement, co-starring her ward, Simon (Simon Iteanu). Explaining how she got the balloon to move exactly how she wanted, Song briefly talks about green screens and the pratfalls of modern, low-budget filmmaking, giving Hsiao-hsien a behind-the-scenes fantasia of sorts within his own film. Simon's father, a writer in self-imposed exile in Montreal, has only one interaction by phone, but his presence is aptly felt through Simon's mother's (Juliette Binoche) barbed interactions with her husband's friend and current tenant, Marc (Hippolyte Girardot).
  
  Binoche is a dream. Like the city in which the film is based, Hsiao-hsien has stripped Binoche of her token abilities: her dark hair mussed and badly dyed into a blonde mess, her usual role as centre of gravity thrown into a state of utter upheaval, her coy beauty mutated into a palette of raw nerves. Yet, through this act of deviation, Binoche gives one of her best performances to date, at once completely spontaneous and thoughtfully patient.
  
  In a year brimming with great French films, it's ironic that the most successful of them would come from a Chinese-born, Taiwan-educated filmmaker. Like Wong Kar-wai's first immersion into foreign language cinema, the English-tongued My Blueberry Nights, Hsiao-hsien continues to study the same tropes of his outstanding Chinese output: loneliness, isolation, stilted love. It also touches on the polarizing effect of city life and travel, a strong force in the master's 2003 tribute to Ozu, Café Lumière. But whereas Wong's exercise coaxes out the director's inevitable faults when not working in his language, Flight of the Red Balloon highlights Hsiao-hsien' staggering strengths, both aesthetically and technically speaking: Like the rest of Hsiao-hsien's oeuvre, his latest feels like the culmination of all his works beforehand.
  
  Working with the masterful cinematographer Mark Lee Ping Bing, Hsiao-hsien, who gave his actors full character histories but no written dialogue, delivers all the film's action in confined settings. A cramped, cluttered apartment, a darkened puppet theatre, the narrow streets of Paris: Somehow these areas breed imagination for Hsiao-hsien's actors. Shot in his patently-resplendent long takes, the aesthetic is seemingly unencumbered, but, coupled with Chu Shih Yi's gentle sound design, the images breathlessly unspool into suites of effortless intricacy.
  
  As Suzanne argues heatedly with Marc downstairs, Hsiao-hsien's camera wanders around the apartment as Song and Simon prepare for a mid-day snack and a blind tuner repairs Suzanne's piano. All the sounds and movements of the characters co-mingle, interact, climax, and then gently descend: You won't see anything as rapturous as this in any film made or released in 2008.

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  January 28, 2009

  her69eyes

  "Flight of the Red Balloon", directed by Hou Hsiao-hsien, is a movie without plot. It has a story, yes, but if you're expecting a clearly defined conflict and narrative than you'll be left scratching your head throughout the two hour runtime of the film. Rather, it just lets thin...( read more)gs happen and we see them as the characters see them. In this case, the biggest anchor point for the audience to connect with is a young boy, Simon (Simon Iteanu). Him and his mother, Suzanne (Juliette Binoche), live in a cluttered apartment. Suzanne works as a puppeteer, providing voiceover work for an array of characters. There's a few scenes of her at work, and Binoche dominates the scenes so much that the haunted woman in "Blue" and the cheerful sweets seller in "Chocolat" seem to be other women entirely.
  
  At the beginning of the film, we see Suzanne as an overworked and stressed single mother. To carry the load, she hires a nanny for Simon, a young Chinese film student named Song (Fang Song). Song and Simon share a common love of observation and film the unextraordinary for minutes on end. Song tells Simon of Albert Lamorisse's short "The Red Balloon", and throughout the film Hsiao-hsien pays homage to the 1956 Oscar-winner. The first scene of the film involves a red balloon in pursuit of Simon, as if a guardian angel, and the same balloon follows him throughout the film. At first it's easy to dismiss this as pretentious drabble, but it's the elaborate way these scenes are put together that make it so compelling. I'm still trying to figure out how they got the balloon to behave in that manner so effortlessly.
  
  Much of the film takes place in the confines of a single apartment, and we simply watch characters come and go. There's a piano teacher, the neighbors who use Suzanne's kitchen, and a couple of manual laborers who move Simon's piano into another room. Also, Suzanne frequently phones her boyfriend who has been gone in Montreal writing a screenplay. She will tell you otherwise, but we get the sense that he won't be coming back.
  
  At the end of the film, Simon and his class take a field trip to an art museum and are sat in front of a painting. There's a boy chasing a balloon in the center of it. The children look on in wonder as their teacher tells them about the peculiar differences in the perspectives, and the inclusion of two adult figures in the background. Simon could care less as he glances up with awe at the red balloon hovering above the art museum. In a scene like this one, we get the sense that Hsiao-hsien is telling us to avoid all analysis of his work. He simply wants us to observe, not analyze, and thereby echo the child fascinated with the dance of a simple red balloon. The film is very uneventful and will leave some viewers anxious, however it's fascinating enough to never let you lose interest.

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  May 20, 2008

  Drewbacca

  Damn slow. 9 people in the theater to start.... 3when the credits finally rolled.

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  April 18, 2008

  columbiatch

  This is no doubt my favorite modern HHH film. It's a beautiful slice of life in Paris as seen through the eyes of a foreigner, or perhaps from the viewpoint of the red balloon which seems to symbolize the wonder and curiosity of childhood. Of course Hou integrates his theme of hi...( read more)story's impact on the present gracefully into the spontaneous, free-flowing narrative. Also similar to Cafe Lumiere the film depicts the interpretation of a foreign culture from one's own, as in how the character played by Binoche runs a chinese-inspired puppet show (a reference to The Puppetmaster) and how the Chinese film student is trying to film a homage to The Red Balloon. The composition and inventive use of reflections make this IMO the most visually accomplished film among his post 2000 films. Binoche does a great job here as well. In one of my favorite scenes a class of schoolchildren goes to a museum with their teacher to see Félix Vallotton's painting "The Balloon." When they are asked whether the painting is happy or sad, one child says that since part of the painting is dark and part of it is light, the painting is both happy and sad. The description sums up the mood of the film.

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  March 23, 2008

  wbgoose13

  Convincingly acted, but oh so very eye-rottingly dull. I'm all for movies without plot, but is a point too much to ask for?

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  October 22, 2009

  jimbotender

  Lovely but whoever repulsed the engraving of the unsurpassed cinematography of Lamorisse's grand achievement,it will be difficult to positively react to this demi-homage by Hsiao-Hsien.I must admit it was moving though the carefree motivations of the film's mechanism were already...( read more) empty from the first half of the picture.

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  October 3, 2009

  Phonex

  Paris, the present. Seven-year-old Simon is followed around the city by a mysterious red balloon.
  
  His mother Suzanne, busy rehearsing a new play for her Chinese puppet theatre, hires Taiwanese film student Song as Simon's childminder. For her college project - a homage to Albe...( read more)rt Lamorisse's famous 1956 film The Red Balloon - Song starts to film Simon walking and playing around Paris. She develops a rapport with mother and son, and translates for Suzanne's masterclass with a Chinese puppet master. Simon misses his teenage half-sister Louise, who visits Paris occasionally and teaches him pinball. The balloon appears periodically outside Simon's cramped apartment, either drifting over the neighbourhood rooftops or bobbing outside his window. Suzanne works on her new puppet play, and tries to evict her downstairs tenant Marc, who has failed to pay his rent. She argues on the phone with Pierre, Simon's father, who has absented himself to Canada for two years to write a novel and who is rarely in touch. The balloon appears again outside Simon's apartment, unseen by Song or Simon. Suzanne evicts Marc, who yells that Pierre will never come back to her. Simon visits the Musée d'Orsay on a school trip, where his class is shown The Ball, a painting by Félix Vallotton in which a child chases a red ball. As they discuss it, the red balloon bumps against the museum's skylight windows before flying off over the city

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  April 8, 2009

  5oclockcoffee

  Visually strong and stunning and with a naturalistic plot, "The Flight of the Red Balloon" follows the characters and Paris´s day-by-day life. Nothing different or huge happens... that´s life just as it is.
  Like in "Three Times" (unfourtanely I´m just beginning to know Hsiao-hs...( read more)ien Hou´s work), we see a poetically filmed slice of common life.
  
  Albert Lamorisse ´s "The Red Balloon" is brought into the movie by the film student baby-sitter Song who films a short film about red balloons. I´m pretty sure that the first scenes where we see Simon talking to the balloon and later, alone in the metro, hiding himself from it are part of Song´s film. In "The Red Balloon" Pascal takes the bus and goes alone to school, but here we clear see that Simon never stays by himself. Also, Simon is a boy of "modern times" who likes video game and stuffs alike. When he is with the other school kids at the Musee d'Orsay (to look at the Félix Vallotton's painting "Le Ballon") and suddenly turns his head up and see the red balloon seems to be the first time he really sees the balloon (and not a "fake" one of Song´s film).
  
  I don´t know if the boy who plays Simon is a real actor, but he talks and acts so naturally that I tend to think he is not. Speaking about acting, Juliette Binoche is simply great. With a not usual character type to her, Binoche plays Suzanne (kinda mix of her previous characters in "Jet Lag" and "Code Unkown") amazingly joyful.
  
  
  

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• 
  
  January 9, 2009

  Jameshy

  Shot in more of a documentary style, this film with it's naturalistic approach serves as more of a glimpse at Parisian life than a movie. There is hardly a plot but instead a meandering story revolving around a small child in which nothing really happens. This isn't a bad thing...( read more) as you get to just sit back and take in the performances from the actors as if you were watching real life. The piano music drifting in and out throughout the film was a little tame but suited the artsy direction of the film. Juliette does great as the stressed career mum and the Chinese lady's calm persona is good to watch too. The french really are just so cool compared to most countries. I didn't really get all the references to the red balloon but the film is a homage to an old filmmaker. I think the red balloon symbolises the child's wandering imagination or something. A pretty uneventful film, but enjoyable nethertheless as an eye-opener into another way of life.

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  December 15, 2008

  xxxcli213xxx

  no thanks not my thing

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