Flight of the Red Balloon

An altogether sublime serenade, Hao-Hsiao Hsien’s Flight of the Red Balloon, the Taiwanese wonderkind’s first western movie, a French-language reworking of Albert Lamorisse’s 1956 short film La Ballon Rouge, is a light, completely irresistible movie. Juliette Binoche channels vintage Gena Rowlands as Suzanne, a high-strung Parisian puppeteer for whom drama is always bubbling just beneath the surface of every relationship. Consumed by her work, she is estranged from her novelist husband and college-student daughter, both now living abroad. When she isn’t working, she’s feuding with her downstairs neighbor, a friend of her husband, while barely managing to find time for her precocious son Simon. He is the object obsession followed not just by his new Taiwanese film-student-turned-nanny Song, but also a red balloon that haunts the young boy’s presence like a ghost.

Although less omniscient than in Lamorisse’s original, the balloon functions more as a silent observer of the melancholy mysteries that make up so much of our lives, and specifically for Simon, the beauty and innocence of youth, which like the flight of a balloon is both wistful and fleeting. Song's short video pieces featuring Simon and this mysterious balloon give the film and its director an anchor, the poised perspective of an outsider from which to plumb Paris depths and explore its rich skies. A can’t-miss film, it confirms Hao, the auteur behind Goodbye South, Goodbye, Café Lumiere, and Flowers From Shanghai, as a stylist who can transport his particular brand of cinema just about anywhere.

                                                              Brandon Harris