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Pop CultureDo boys today still have time for red balloons?

By David Haglund
Posted Tuesday, May 6, 2008, at 11:54 AM ET

(Continued from page 1)

Hou's Flight, now in the midst of a small U.S. run, stars Juliette Binoche, bleach-blond and wonderfully unkempt as Suzanne, a Parisian woman who provides voices for a puppet theater. She also deals with the deadbeat tenants in the apartment below; pleads with an absent husband off writing a novel in Montreal; and takes rather erratic care of her son, Simon. When the movie begins, she has just hired Song (Fang Song) to be Simon's nanny. Both women are artists: Suzanne is a performer, the center of attention, while Song is an observer, collecting material (she's working on her own homage to The Red Balloon). Both are clearly devoted to their work—and, in their different ways, self-absorbed.

Which brings us to Simon, the heir to Pascal. Though he doesn't lack for company, Simon seems just as isolated as his predecessor. With his PlayStation and his piano lessons, he's far busier than his 1950s forebear, who had little in his schedule to interfere with balloon-following. (If Simon ever sees The Red Balloon, it's safe to assume it will not be in a dark library with a bunch of other kids, but at home, and on Blu-ray.) There's a commentary here, also present in Hou's other recent films, on the hectic pace of contemporary life and the sheer number of distractions with which a mere balloon would have to contend for the attentions of a young boy.

In Flight's opening scene, which is directly adapted from the Lamorisse original, Simon tries to get the balloon to join him on public transportation (the subway this time, rather than a trolley). The balloon is coy, floating behind the leaves of a tree for a minute or two, in a manner reminiscent of the original balloon's occasional flirtatiousness. Except that the balloon in Flight never comes back out into the open: It is nearly always behind a window or a door, just outside the world of Simon, Suzanne, and Song. In the movie's longest passage, all three of them sit around their apartment, up to various things, while a fourth person tunes the piano and the red balloon hovers outside. Here, Hou's talent for layering the screen with multiple points of attention—and his patience in allowing the viewer's focus to drift slowly to each of these points—is at its most impressive. The scene is seven or eight minutes long and all a single take.

The argument may seem clear: The enemies of beauty are no longer school and church and the mob but the clutter and distraction of contemporary life. And yet the sheer loveliness of the piano-tuning scene complicates that idea: Hou has crafted an exquisite scene out of just such dissonance and disorder. Perhaps, he seems to suggest, we can find beauty in clutter and distraction, with a little more patience and quiet attention. Hou has not updated The Red Balloon so much as adapted its symbolism for his own purposes.

In the film's penultimate scene, Simon visits the Musee d'Orsay in Paris on a field trip, and we watch as his class discusses "Le Ballon," by Félix Vallotton. In the painting, a child in the foreground runs after a red ball, while two women in the distance go about their business. By reaching a century into the past ("Le Ballon" is from 1899; one of the film's working titles was À la recherche du ballon rouge), Hou implies that the red balloon, and whatever it represents, has always been elusive, and that Simon will chase after it in his own way, as Pascal did in his. One of Simon's classmates describes the painting as "a bit happy and a bit sad," since the foreground is light and sunny and the background is dark and shadowed. This is also true of Hou's film, which, rather than lifting Simon above Paris with a phalanx of multicolored balloons, ends with a single red balloon floating alone above the city—distant, perhaps, but not entirely out of reach.

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David Haglund is the managing editor of PEN America, the literary magazine published by PEN American Center.
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Comment from the Fray

The key word here is "once"; as in, "I saw this movie once." At our elementary school they showed us movies in the cafeteria every Friday after lunch. At least once a month we had to sit through "The Red Balloon." The artiness of it was completely lost on us SoCal kids. It got to where we had the tin that the movie spool came in memorized, so we knew before they even put it on the reel that we were going to have to sit through the goddam "Red Balloon" again.

But maybe there was a sinister subliminal logic in this; I love foreign films now and the author's description of this movie makes me think it's worth a re-look-see. Then again, maybe I'll just go get one of my knitting needles and plunge it into my eyes, thereby insuring that I will never never never again have to sit through The Goddam "Red Balloon"!

--Mermaid33

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