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A film review in the French style
By
Robert-Emile Lesoine

The Flight of the Red Balloon is a new vision of the 1957 classic created by Chinese director/writer Hsiao-hsien Hou. The original film, directed and written by Albert Lamorisse, was a poignant short that is etched in my memory as one of my earliest and happiest film experiences.  It is a pure and simple masterpiece of style and cinematic construction: balloon follows boy, boy reaches for balloon, balloon retreats but always follows, is always there above or outside boy’s window or in his dreams. The balloon plays its joyful little game with him. It is as unassailable, as unreachable as the ideal of love, hope or adventure. Yet the balloon never abandons the boy. It hovers above like an aura
of protection—a potential wholeness.

The new film is longer, running 113 minutes, which at times seems almost too long. It begins with similar images of boy and balloon but then goes in a completely different direction. If the magic of original was its understatement, Hou’s film is just the opposite. This film seems to show us everything in the boy’s life that was off camera in the original. We see how he lives when the balloon is not there: his shattered family life split by divorce, his loneliness and boredom, his reaching out for love. As the dream of the balloon recedes we are left with the stark reality of a very ordinary life.

Jullette Binoche plays the boy’s mother, Suzanne, remarkably. She is the voice of a puppeteer, whose creative life leaves little time for her son. She hires a Chinese nanny, Song, played by Fang Song, who takes care of the boy, Simon Iteanu, while she dreams in her free moments with a camcorder in hand of making her own “red balloon” film. Song is constantly recording on video the mundane Parisian reality of the boy’s life sans balloon. That Parisian reality—the cobble stone streets, the parks, the warm domestic interiors and cafes—looks quite beautiful even in their most pedestrian moments.

This film is at its best when it shows these cinema verté visions of everyday French life—the interiors of apartments, family and social interactions, the intimate moments between mother and son—all of which were left out of the original.

The life of a divorced, creative single mom, her struggle to maintain her commitments to her art and her child, the evicting of a troublesome tenant friend of her ex-husband, all combine to make this film more about the mother than the child. We see her life as the voice of the puppet show as she rehearses and perfects her craft. All this is played most brilliantly and convincingly by Mme Binoche, who is at her very best in these natural verté moments as she grapples with a life that seems to be slipping away. Her love and her connection to her son are the only real things she has to hold on to. It is this love that will ground her and eventually save her and her son. And it is this constantly following yet out of reach mother’s love for which the red balloon becomes a floating and indelible metaphor.