Beyond a means to keep a
French 101 class occupied for 34 minutes, most remember Albert Lamorisse's 1956
short "The Red Balloon" as the magical, nearly dialogue-free tale of a sentient
balloon that follows a little boy around the streets of Paris. But it's also
extremely bittersweet, since the boy lacks allies among non-helium-filled
life-forms, and even his newfound friend is eventually destroyed by a group of
bullies. His essential loneliness makes the feature-length homage The Flight
Of The Red Balloon
a good fit for Taiwanese master Hou Hsiao-hsien, a poet of alienation whose
recent work has set characters adrift in major cities like Taipei (Millennium
Mambo)
and Tokyo (Café Lumière). Like the latter film—made to honor the 50th
anniversary of Yasujiro Ozu's Tokyo Story—Flight was commissioned by
producers overseas, and it feels similarly, impeccably slight, as if Hou were
resigned to playing a tourist in his own movie.
Hou gets a surprisingly
robust, even brassy, performance out of Juliette Binoche as a tough-as-nails
single mother who works as a voice artist at a puppet theater. As Binoche
throws herself into her latest production, she leaves her son Simon Iteanu
under the care of Chinese nanny Fang Song, who speaks French fluidly, but is
nonetheless an outsider in Paris. Followed, from a distance, by a red balloon,
the boy and his nanny wander the city streets, which Hou shoots with little dialogue
and a special attentiveness to the natural bustle and ambience of traffic. The
film's minor drama concerns Binoche's attempts to evict an annoying tenant
(Hippolyte Girardot) from her apartment building.
Nothing much happens in The
Flight Of The Red Balloon, and that's all by design: Hou means to evoke a city and a
few of the lonely characters within it, and he does so with consummate grace,
affection, and a subtle touch of magic. The film disappoints more in context
with his career than as a standalone piece; once a director who brought history
to scrupulous life in the modern classics The Puppetmaster and Flowers Of
Shanghai,
Hou has lately contented himself with pretty little baubles that, Three
Times
excepted, are lacking in ambition. There's no doubt he pays loving respect to
beloved staples like Tokyo Story and "The Red Balloon," but he's better off
returning to movies that might inspire others to pay homage to him.