Review of Flight Of the Red Balloon

Hsiao-Hsien's Latest Substitutes Underhanded Realism For Wide-Eyed Idealism

Growing up is hard to do. Albert Lamorisse's seminal 1956 film, The Red Balloon, was about the pains and complications of coming of age, shown in marked contrast with the easygoing lifestyle of being a child. But Lamorisse's film itself has come of age - it turns 52 this year - and has been appropriately reimagined by Hou Hsiao-Hsien, the gifted Taiwanese filmmaker. It would be unfair, for a number of reasons, to call Hsiao-Hsien's The Voyage Of The Red Balloon a remake of Lamorisse's original. First off, Lamorisse's film was a short, whereas Voyage clocks in at just under two hours. But more importantly, while Lamorisse's film was a paean to the joys of childhood - and the lengths one must go to to preserve the innocence of that time - Hsiao-Hsien's film is a meditation on the difficult process of transitioning from childhood to adulthood (a transition Voyage views as necessary). Our protagonist is Song (Song Fang), a young Taiwanese woman living in Paris who is hired by Suzanne (Juliette Binoche) to be the nanny to Suzanne's son, Simon (Simon Iteanu). Simon, like the boy in the original, is followed around by a red balloon; but unlike that film's balloon, which persistently dogged our young boy to no end, here the balloon is glimpsed only from time to time. Its presence is far less persistent, as if Hsiao-Hsien is acknowledging that the joys of youth are giving up, that they're no longer as insistent of their own existence. If the red balloon's presence in the original film was an exuberant one, here it is downright resigned. Song is caught between an interesting juxtaposition. Simon is a seven-year-old boy, and his interests are not dissimilar from the children of that age. He plays piano, he likes the balloon, and he is generally unconcerned with his greater surroundings. By contrast, Suzanne (the key addition to this story) is completely swept up in the most unpleasant reminders of adult life: her downstairs tenants are rude and noisy, and need to be kicked out. Her husband is away, and important contracts he signed are nowhere to be found. She's putting on a puppet show, and is dealing with the stresses of that production. Caught in the middle of this is Song, who is both attentive to her own childlike desires (she films Simon playing frequently, with the careless abandon of a Lamorisse making his original) but she also is in tune with the needs of adult life - after all, she is working this job as a nanny because she needs the money. This cross-section is at the center of the film's thematic content. However, this thematization is by no means all that there is to the film. To discuss a Hsiao-Hsien film is to discuss aesthetics, and the stylistic maneuvering here is essential to what makes the film of interest. Hsiao-Hsien achieves a sort of understated, elegant realism that is both simple, tedious and graceful all at once. His greatest achievement in this regard is his ability to take simple, physical tasks and turn them into artistic set pieces. Take, for example, the scene where two movers move a giant piano upstairs, into Suzanne's apartment. Or a similarly stylized sequence where a blind man tunes the same piano. Each sequence is done in long takes, with a quiet grace that slowly burns, bringing the viewer deeper and deeper into a kind of dreamlike, aestheticized realism as it goes along. A sequence where Suzanne performs her puppet show is equally mesmerizing. Lamorisse's film has grown up, and Voyage of the Red Balloon is not a eulogizing of it so much as an updating of it - an updating not to fit in more with contemporary times, but an updating of the narrative so as to make it more mature. The red balloon can't always take us away with it, Hsiao-Hsien seems trying to say. Instead, we often have to let it float away on its own. It's a depressing statement about the lost dreams/idealism/naivete/(insert your own term here) of childhood, but it's a far more mature one than it's French predecessor.

-Zachary Wigon 

Posted on 04/04/08 by: FC Scribes 02:12 PM