Review of Flight of the Red Balloon (2007) by Shaun P — 28 Jan 2009

"Flight of the Red Balloon", directed by Hou Hsiao-hsien, is a movie without plot. It has a story, yes, but if you're expecting a clearly defined conflict and narrative than you'll be left scratching your head throughout the two hour runtime of the film. Rather, it just lets things happen and we see them as the characters see them. In this case, the biggest anchor point for the audience to connect with is a young boy, Simon (Simon Iteanu). Him and his mother, Suzanne (Juliette Binoche), live in a cluttered apartment. Suzanne works as a puppeteer, providing voiceover work for an array of characters. There's a few scenes of her at work, and Binoche dominates the scenes so much that the haunted woman in "Blue" and the cheerful sweets seller in "Chocolat" seem to be other women entirely.

At the beginning of the film, we see Suzanne as an overworked and stressed single mother. To carry the load, she hires a nanny for Simon, a young Chinese film student named Song (Fang Song). Song and Simon share a common love of observation and film the unextraordinary for minutes on end. Song tells Simon of Albert Lamorisse's short "The Red Balloon", and throughout the film Hsiao-hsien pays homage to the 1956 Oscar-winner. The first scene of the film involves a red balloon in pursuit of Simon, as if a guardian angel, and the same balloon follows him throughout the film. At first it's easy to dismiss this as pretentious drabble, but it's the elaborate way these scenes are put together that make it so compelling. I'm still trying to figure out how they got the balloon to behave in that manner so effortlessly.

Much of the film takes place in the confines of a single apartment, and we simply watch characters come and go. There's a piano teacher, the neighbors who use Suzanne's kitchen, and a couple of manual laborers who move Simon's piano into another room. Also, Suzanne frequently phones her boyfriend who has been gone in Montreal writing a screenplay. She will tell you otherwise, but we get the sense that he won't be coming back.

At the end of the film, Simon and his class take a field trip to an art museum and are sat in front of a painting. There's a boy chasing a balloon in the center of it. The children look on in wonder as their teacher tells them about the peculiar differences in the perspectives, and the inclusion of two adult figures in the background. Simon could care less as he glances up with awe at the red balloon hovering above the art museum. In a scene like this one, we get the sense that Hsiao-hsien is telling us to avoid all analysis of his work. He simply wants us to observe, not analyze, and thereby echo the child fascinated with the dance of a simple red balloon. The film is very uneventful and will leave some viewers anxious, however it's fascinating enough to never let you lose interest.