Red Balloon

Hou Hsiao-hsien's new movie The Flight of the Red Balloon gets me thinking about the original Red Balloon, childhood and how life has changed

In The Red Balloon, a short film made in 1956 by the French director Albert Lamorisse, a little boy finds a balloon tied to a lamppost. It is big, perfectly round and red as a sun-ripened tomato. Before long, the boy discovers it is also a loyal friend. When he lets go of the string, it doesn't fly off but instead follows him wherever he goes. As he and the balloon walk through the streets of Paris, people watch with amusement.

Shot under cloudy Parisian skies, The Red Balloon is a 34-minute tone poem on celluloid, one of the loveliest, most perfect little movies ever made. Using less than 10 words of dialog and paying close attention to gestures, colors and textures, Lamorisse captures the imaginative world of a small boy. This was the first movie I ever saw when I was a child, and it forever shaped my hopes about movies. It also helped shape my feelings about the world.

So last month, when I heard that the Taiwanese director Hou Hsiao-hsien had made a film called The Flight of the Red Balloon, which was a sort of homage to the Lamorisse original, I was immediately enchanted and intrigued. On the one hand, how wonderful that--fifty years after its creation--another filmmaker wanted to salute the little beauty. On the other hand, considering the perfection of the original, what could another director possibly add?

In New York City, Hou Hsiao-hsien's film is currently playing at the Paris at 58th Street and Fifth Avenue, one of the few single-screen theaters left in Manhattan. Just walking into its small, unpretentious lobby brings back memories of New York's cinematic heyday.

"Remember when all movie theaters were like this, without the bling?" my husband said fondly, as we stepped through the glass doors on Saturday night.

He reminisced about taking his girlfriend to the Paris to see Zeffirelli's Romeo and Juliet in 1968. I recalled going to see A Man and A Woman with Anouk Aimée and Jean-Louis Trintignant two years earlier. The Paris Theatre, we agreed, was the perfect place for an homage to a classic French movie.

Before the opening credits roll, The Flight of the Red Balloon begins much like the original, with a little boy trying to climb up a lamp post to reach a balloon. But soon it's obvious that Hou is up to something else. While Lamorisse's film is tightly focussed on the story of the boy, Hou's moves in and out of time frames and between three characters--a boy named Simon (played by Simon Iteanu), his mother Suzanne (Juliette Binoche), and his new Chinese nanny, Song (Song Fang).

In addition to being a nanny, Song is a film student who is making a movie inspired by Lamorisse's Red Balloon. She walks around with a video camera, filming Simon. The first images, we eventually deduce, were not scenes from Simon's real life, but scenes staged for Song's movie.

Fans of French director Eric Rohmer, who specializes in creating a slice of life ambience, will enjoy many aspects of Hou's film. Like Rohmer, Hou shoots long, slow scenes in real time and generally avoids the use of music on the soundtrack to cue our emotions. We get lots of footsteps and other ambient sound as the characters walk around the chaotic little apartment that Suzanne and Simon call home. We feel we are there, sharing the loft with them, wishing somebody would offer us a bowl of soup and pick up the papers scattered across the floor.

As Rohmer fans know, slice of life can work well when the scenes are played by fine actors and we are focussed on the engaging conflicts of their characters. Without these ingredients, real time can turn into real tedium.

At first I was charmed by the meandering pace of Hou's movie, but soon began tapping my fingers. Who are these characters? Why should I care about them? And what's Hou trying to do here, anyway? I wondered with increasing exasperation.

Lacking the open, poetic face of the little boy in the original Red Balloon, Simon Iteanu is a cipher. How does he feel about his mother, his nanny... his life? At a local cafe and at home, he plays video games, his eyes fixed with rapt attention on the screen. The black box seems to interest him more than his piano lessons, Song's video camera or the movie she is making. But it's hard to know for sure, since he doesn't express much emotion about anything.

Song, with her boyish haircut, modest clothing and polite demeanor is even more of a mystery. What does she think about the haphazard apartment and the strange Parisians she is working for? Coming from Beijing, does she think this domestic situation is just par-for-the-course in Paris or entirely off-the-wall?

At one point, after a scene in Suzanne's apartment seemed to have droned on for at least ten minutes, I became convinced that The Flight of the Red Balloon was intended as a parody of French cinema.

"How do you know a New Wave film when you see one?" I imagined one Chinese director joking to another. "When nobody notices that nothing is happening... in real time."

Not fair! I thought angrily. Lamorisse was not really a New Wave director, although he was hailed by some of them. And a lot actually happens in The Red Balloon, which is as carefully constructed as a villanelle.

After the little boy's initial delight, a gang of street toughs set their sights on the balloon. They chase the boy and his prize through the rain-slicked alleys of Menilmontant. We hear his leather-soled shoes slapping over the the cobblestones, as he dodges old ladies carrying baguettes and swerves past mangy dogs sitting on stone steps. Then comes the tattoo of their many shoes in pursuit--little rag-tag fascists on the loose. In post-war Paris, we know ominous signs when we see them.

Behind its modest exterior, there is classic conflict in The Red Balloon. Not so in Hou's movie which, like a moth, never seems to move in one direction for long. Midway through, I leaned over to whisper to my husband that it was a good thing we hadn't brought our teenage daughter. Although she is a fan of the original film, this one would have put her off foreign films for a good long time.

But then--finally--something did happen. Juliette Binoche got a chance to do some acting. And here is the beauty of shooting in real time. It is as close as any movie actor will get to the roots of their craft--the stage.

Hou does what few movie directors have the guts or maybe the funding to do these days. Instead of trying to construct his characters out of a hundred quick cuts and strategic juxtapositions, he lets his actors take the lead. You can almost see him switching on the camera, then settling back in his chair to see what transpires. In the case of amateurs Iteanu and Fang, this is probably a mistake. But with the seasoned and gifted Binoche, what transpires is spun gold.

Binoche plays a single mother, living on the edge in modern Paris. Her bleached blond hair is never quite combed, and the roots are showing. She loves her son Simon, but she has little time for him. Rushing back and forth to her job as a puppeteer, to seminars and meetings, she's in a perpetual state of stress and disarray. Her wardrobe is thrift-shop funky, and her apartment is not the usual confection dreamed up by Hollywood designers, it's for-real bohemian. There's a mess in her kitchen and an ugly plastic dumpster on the street in front of her door. Hou's got the ambience down.

None of this would matter if it weren't for Binoche, who inhabits her character with the intensity of a true artist. Suzanne veers between helplessness and determination, melancholy and glee. She has the imagination to animate the puppets in her theater, yet she can't figure out how to sheild Simon and Song from her problems. She'll pick up the phone to rage at an absent lover, never mind who's listening. But she'll also clasp Simon to her breast in a moment of motherly compassion.

Suzanne is the definition of dysfunctional. Still, we love her for her mercurial moods, her irrepressible style, and her sense of humor in the face of a world that is essentially bleak. Especially in one of the last scenes of the film, when she sits in her apartment, surrounded by the detritus of her life, chatting with a piano tuner who is working in the corner, and teasing Simon, trying to get a rise out of him, Suzanne is a Tennessee Williams character, demented but brave, soldiering ever onward. Williams' women are poetic caricatures, Daumier drawings, Don Quixotes in dresses. But Binoche's modern Suzanne is the flesh and blood reality. I have known this woman. You probably have too. You want to slap her. But you also want to give her a hug.

Hou's The Flight of the Red Balloon is confusing. Moments of inspired acting are sandwiched between eons of dead screen time. One character practically bleeds on camera, while the others are as unrevealing as the statues of Easter Island. Balloons and references to balloons appear and disappear, like misplaced quotations from a half-forgotten poem.

It's hard to know what Hou thinks he's doing. Is he deliberately using a slow movie to comment on our fast times? Perhaps he's walking the tightrope of irony, hoping to let the helium out of the Lamorisse classic and also poke fun at the New Wave generation. Or is he simply sampling styles from old movies--heedless of content--posturing as Deconstructionist D.J. of the twenty-first century cinema?

Despite the good reviews the film has provoked, I haven't yet found a critic who's convincingly made sense of this movie. But if a performance can outlive its vehicle, Binoche's Suzanne will be around for some time to come.

Meanwhile, the 1956 Red Balloon continues to bob overhead like a beacon from a bygone age. That dreamy-faced little boy, who was played by the director's son, probably couldn't exist today... at least not in Paris, New York, LA or Rome. Now children live under so much more pressure. They're expected to be smarter, faster and better than any generation before. And they are. But who has time for balloons when there are video games and MySpace sites and stacks upon stacks of homework to be done?

It's not that life was any easier for children a half a century ago. That gang of street thugs--they catch up with the boy. And the balloon meets a sorry end. When I was four, sitting in one of New York's old West Side theaters, tears stung my eyes and rolled down my cheeks as I watched the red balloon shiver, like a wounded animal, then slowly shrink to nothing.

Children suffered fifty years ago, and they suffer today, whether over the death of a balloon or the deaths of real people. But now it seems that so often we don't acknowledge our children's suffering. We are so busy, rushing from one place to the next, steering the kids from one activity to another. We've got no time to spare. No space for pain, we seem to be saying.

Like our lives today, our video games, TV shows and movies proceed at a breakneck speed, dispensing with days, years and entire lives in the space of seconds. Is this a case of art imitating life or life imitating art? I wonder.

Like so many other children I have watched, little blank-faced Simon locks onto the video games and seems to be sucked into another dimension--a place without emotion. He doesn't cry... and he doesn't laugh either. In this new reality where there is no place for suffering, can there be any place for joy?

After the street toughs have their way and the red balloon dies a terrible death, we cry... if we are children. If we are grownups, we mourn. We know this balloon isn't just an old, stretched out piece of rubber. It's something essential.

But, wait... the story isn't over. Lamorisse has a coda. There are many balloons all over Paris. And they are magical. Suddenly those balloons jump from the hands of their owners, from the hands of children, balloon men and nursemaids. They fly out of windows and chimney pots. They float, single file down the boulevards. At last the sad little boy looks up and sees. They are coming to him.

Blue balloons, yellow balloons, green, white and red balloons stream down from the sky into the empty lot where the boy is sitting. Finally, the Parisian cloud cover has broken and the sun is shining. It shines through the balloons, painting colors on the boy's smiling face. He reaches up and gathers the strings together, pulling them close to him. Then he is lifted up, up into the sky. The balloons carry him over the rooftops of Paris, and there's no stopping him now. It seems he will rise forever.

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Coming soon: Review of Harold & Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay