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 Screening exclusively at Blue Room Cinebar from Thursday Aug 7 [PG]
Director: Hsiao-hsien Hou
Runtime: 110mins
Flight Of The Red Balloon is Taiwanese director Hsiao-hsien Hou’s first film made outside of Asia. It was filmed in Paris and sponsored by a museum, the Musée d’Orsay, under the stipulation that a scene be filmed there. The red balloon of the title is an observer of the day-to-day lives of a small French family consisting of single mother Suzanne (Juliet Binoche), her son Simon (Simon Iteanu) and nanny Song (Song Fang).
Binoche is the highlight of the film, excellent in her role as a fraught and easily frazzled single mother too tangled in a disagreement with her downstairs tenants and her job as a performer in a puppet theatre to be there for her child. Oddly, her son Simon is perhaps the easiest child to look after in the world, getting perfect scores in maths and never causing trouble for film student/nanny Song, an obvious stand-in for the director. Song, like Hou, is fascinated by Albert Lamorisse’s 1956 short film The Red Balloon, which this movie is a homage to, even going so far as to make her own homage within the homage.
The titular balloon, only ever observed by the boy, vanishes for an hour in the middle of the film and a significant part of the audience will probably want to do the same. Despite the good performances, the film focuses intently on the least interesting aspects of its characters’ lives. While Simon’s attempt to explain his complicated family history to Song or the scenes behind the scenes at the puppet show – in which Suzanne is more animated and present than she ever appears to be with her son – are compelling, they are squeezed between extended scenes of nothing much happening at all. Pancakes are made, piano lessons are taken and rental agreements disagreed over, but none of it shown with any panache. Many of the domestic scenes are shot from the same angle, never more than a plain document of the trivial and ordinary. Everything drifts along as aimlessly as the lonely balloon.
When the balloon returns towards the end of the film it floats over the rooftops of Paris in a way that hints at some of the charm and whimsy of the short film that inspired this one, but while that was only half an hour long, at 110 minutes Flight Of The Red Balloon is over-inflated.
**
JODY MACGREGOR
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