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GLENN KENNY'S REVIEW (posted 3/31/08)

"Beauty's where you find it," the postmodern philosopher Madonna once noted, and that's a particularly apt observation to bear in mind when confronting the films of Taiwan-based director Hou Hsiao-Hsien. His films are generally composed of long takes of scrupulously framed medium shots. Every now and again the camera will make a graceful lateral or diagonal move, but for the most part the viewer is given the impression of looking in on a scene from a fixed perspective. This approach should feel "theatrical" but it hardly ever does. It's all a matter, as Scorsese has noted, of what's in the frame.

Shot in Paris, Flight of the Red Balloon is Hou's second foray out of Taiwan — his lovely 2003 Ozu homage, Café Lumière, was made in Tokyo. Like Lumière, Flight of the Red Balloon is another tribute to a filmmaker, or more specifically, a film — one that cinephiles of a certain age will recognize from Hou's title. But unlike the 1956 Albert Lamorisse short The Red Balloon — Hou's inspiration — this is not a children's picture, although it touches on the imaginative powers and emotional resilience of children. It's another slice of Hou's distinctly poetic realism, and as such, also a kind of tribute to Paris — the Paris of both today and of the older film.

As far as plot is concerned, there's not much. The film begins with a red balloon trailing young Simon (Simon Iteanu, who bears some resemblance to The Shining's young Danny Lloyd) to a rendezvous with his frazzled mom, Suzanne (Binoche, smoking and fretting to spectacular effect) and his new nanny Song (Fang, who goes by her entire real name here and was in fact a student of Hou's). Heralding back to Hou's magnificent 1993 The Puppetmaster, Suzanne here runs a puppet theater, working with a Chinese practitioner of finger-puppeting and staging a story from the Yuan Dynasty. On the other hand, Song — a self-possessed young filmmaker as well as nanny — is composing her own tribute to the Lamorisse film, on digital video. Outside of her artistic realm, Suzanne's life is in chaos; her husband's in Canada, and seems unlikely to come back; her older daughter, Simon's half-sister, is in Belgium with her grandparents, although Suzanne is eager for her to get to Paris — and to that latter end, she's trying to evict some deadbeat tenants in order to get the extra room. Much of the drama, such as it is, takes place around the just-outside-the-kitchen table of Suzanne's railroad apartment — the focal point, the frame, of many of Hou's languid shots. We take in not just the bric-a-brac of this particular corner of an artistic Parisian household; this is also a space where the characters reveal, in frazzled or quiet ways, their essences.

This is all a piece of Hou's commitment to capturing a world, and time in that world. Red Balloon beguiles with its unheralded flashbacks to a more orderly time in Suzanne's life, and other graceful intimations of the past, as when Suzanne presents Song with some reels of 8mm film from her earlier life in Belgium, the contents of which we see on a video screen after Song's transferred them to disc. The film is an almost constant volley of backward glances and forward ones, reaching an apotheosis in its final scene, in which a group of school children at the Orsay museum (one of the film's sponsors) are shown the Félix Vallotton painting "The Balloon" while the film's balloon — which has shown up again only once since its initial sighting by Simon — hovers over the museum's top windows. Is this a figment of Simon's imagination? Or Song's? We don't know, but by this point, many viewers will have found a kind of spiritual rationale for its presence, something that renders the story's lack of resolution not only palatable but retrospectively inevitable. Part of Hou's genius is imbuing this material with emotion that is genuine and tender but never sentimental. This is a slice of life that implies so much more than what's on its surface, something that today's conventional narrative films are increasingly hard-pressed to even attempt.

— Glenn Kenny