Flight of the Red Balloon
Directed by Hou Hsiao-hsien. Written by Hou Hsiao-hsien and François Margolin. With Juliette Binoche, Simon Iteanu and Fang Song. (Unrated)

Obviously there’s just something about French-language films on American movie screens that makes us swoon. Consider the impunity with which they make a sport of our beloved narrative conventions. Taiwanese director Hou Hsiao-hsien’s all-but plotless Flight of the Red Balloon, for instance, offers a rare form of suspense, encouraging us to wonder whether anything is actually going to happen in it.

The answer: nope, not really. Neither a sequel nor a remake of Albert Lamorisse’s perennially kid-pleasing 1956 short The Red Balloon, Hou’s film plays as leisurely hovering, ambient homage: a bloom of quiet mirth in the graceful state of childhood. It makes fine use of a drowsy-eyed seven-year-old Parisian boy named Simon (Simon Iteanu) and of the sense, as in Lamorisse’s film, that a balloon is somehow looking after him.

For context, it offers Simon’s harried single mom, Suzanne (an elegantly slovenly, bleached-blonde Juliette Binoche), who seems at once set adrift and liberated by the challenge of running a home in their charmingly cramped, book-cluttered flat: Her son’s father has gone off to Montreal to write a novel and probably won’t be back; her downstairs tenant is an officious deadbeat; her work as a puppet theater voice artist makes irregular demands. Wisely, or luckily, she has hired a nanny, Song (Song Fang), who’s about as constitutionally serene as Suzanne is flustered. Song is a film student from China, an observant outsider always with her DV camera at the ready, unobtrusively recording quotidian reveries of Parisian life with the quiet confidence that she’ll later assemble something artful from them on her laptop. And why not? That approach seems to work perfectly well for Hou.

A plaintive, pondering movie, Flight of the Red Balloon will strike some viewers as an outrageous bore; what connects its scenes and carries them forward isn’t a ready-made package of narrative intentions but a loose assembly of emotional and aesthetic ones — as studiously orchestrated by Hou’s direction and gathered by Lee Pin-bing’s extraordinary camerawork. As if floating along on all the breezes they stir up, the camera moves between the characters with a childlike, sometimes dreamlike point of view, alert to whatever wonderment may appear. Which, for a patient, sympathetic audience, is considerable. (Let’s be honest: You could point a camera at Binoche’s face for eight hours while she sleeps and still have a very watchable movie.)

And so Hou’s homage has a rich, rewarding legacy: Song’s offhand declaration that she wants to make her own version of The Red Balloon seems not contrived but entirely natural—a welcome affirmation of the joy of filmmaking.

Source: Farfield Weekly

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