Flight of the Red Balloon (2007)

Hou's on-screen surrogate for his entree to Western filmmaking is Song, a Chinese film student in Paris working as a nanny to a young boy, Simon. (She's also shooting a movie on the streets of Paris involving a red balloon, and has Simon take part.) Simon's mother is Suzanne, played with great eccentricity and anxiousness by Juliette Binoche, sporting a shock of blond hair atop an intense, friendly but largely unhappy face. Suzanne works in a puppet theater (a fairly explicit reference to one of Hou's previous films, The Puppetmasters) and lives alone with Simon in a cluttered apartment. The place downstairs is hers, too, but the tenants--friends of her estranged husband--have stopped paying rent. She's eager to throw them out not only because she expects her older daughter will soon need a place to stay in Paris, but also because the couple is, to her mind anyway, ill-mannered, untidy, and inconsiderate.

That's it in a nutshell. Working to some degree in improvisational mode, Hou doesn't generate a lot of narrative, but his images--emphasizing the quality of light passed through windows, or reflected in glass--are masterful and riveting. At times the visual strategy reminded me of Kieslowski, but then there's something less structured and more free about Hou's style. Kieslowski's French-language films were insistent in their beauty, aggressive in their mystery. But nothing in Red Balloon feels especially calculated, or even pre-meditated. Instead, Hou pulls off the illusion that he's just working the camera and the screen space verité-style, trying to get the best angle on Suzanne's unfolding personal crisis, on Simon's young sense of wonder, on Song's tranquil face, lurking around the margins of every scene, sometimes with a camcorder in hand--as always, the filmmaker as tourist, spectator and eavesdropper. She's also a surrogate mother here: she's shooting a film, on DV, about a red balloon floating through the streets of Paris, and she has involved Simon in the picture.

A quick glance around the net shows that many viewers have been frustrated, angered even, by the film's languors. I can understand that it would seem little more than a pretty, exceptionally well-crafted trifle if not for the presence of Binoche, whose single mom is a credible, sympathetic creation. It's a wholly un-selfconscious performance that sneaks up on you until Hou and Binoche both let 'er rip in a couple of key scenes where Suzanne jabbers helplessly into her cell phone--that symbol of simultaneous connectivity and disconnectedness--her feelings of lonesomeness and abandonment palpable enough almost to transform Red Balloon into tragedy.

But then there's Simon, learning piano and growing street-smart, building up his understanding of the world around him even as he wonders at the benevolence of the bright red balloon that appears to him through a skylight in the film's concluding scene. For the balloon's continued presence, he must have Song to thank; she delivered an element of magic that Suzanne was unequipped to provide. It's a wonder that Suzanne surely understands--she seems like the type to remember what it felt like to be a child--even if she's at an age where she knows a bit too much about how the world works to share in that wonder. Flight of the Red Balloon is a little bit happy and a little bit sad, a high-angle view on childhood in the sunlight and adulthood in the shadows, with the much-longed-for consummation of the heart's yearnings floating on the breeze just out of reach.