Movie review: “The Flight of the Red Balloon”
From Thursday’s The Oklahoman.
‘Flight of Red Balloon’ pops before getting off ground
With “The Flight of the Red Balloon,” Taiwanese writer-director Hou Hsiao Hsien creates an arthouse film meant to evoke emotion through improvised dialogue, minimalist plot and lyrical, lingering shots of the non-tourist parts of Paris.
Unfortunately, the emotion his film most consistently prompts is frustration.
Hou made the film as a tribute to the 1956 Oscar-winning French short film “The Red Balloon.” We know his film, which is in French, is an homage because one of the characters flat out tells us, a puzzlingly direct moment in an oblique film.
The opening moments seem to promise an intimate, child’s eye-view of life as Simon (Simon Iteanu), 7, tries to coax a red balloon down from a tree with the promise of candy.
But the Hou soon puts aside this approach for a detached telling of a struggling Paris family. He shoots many of the scenes through glass or reflections, keeping the audience at a distance from the characters.
Simon’s harried single mother Suzanne (the great Juliette Binoche) works as a voice actor for a Chinese puppet theater. and is harried by the demands of single motherhood. His father moved away two years ago, leaving behind only a freeloading boarder (Hippolyte Girardot), the bane of Suzanne’s existence whom Suzanne spends much of the movie trying to offload.
The frazzled Suzanne hires a Chinese film student named Song (Song Fang) as Simon’s nanny. The ever-serene Song takes him on long walks, fixes him pancakes and films him for her tribute to “The Red Balloon.” Along the way, the red balloon bobs through Simon’s life, a kind of silent observer and specter of loneliness.
The slice-of-life story features some solid family drama and glimpses everyday beauty, but the nearly two-hour film is overly long and poorly paced.
Interminable, self-consciously arty long shots lead to sudden, disorienting jump cuts. Scenes of Suzanne’s puppet show or a train ride slowly build and then abruptly end just as they get interesting. Pointless dialogue deflates moments of quiet drama. A moment of quiet drama invoked by the moving of a piano is deflated with pointless dialogue.
Hou’s film is meandering and contrived, to work on its own, but hopefully, it will prompt viewers to see the short that inspired it.
“The Flight of the Red Balloon” is showing today-Saturday at the Oklahoma City Museum of Art.
NOW PLAYING
“The Flight of the Red Balloon” is showing at 7:30 p.m. today and 5:30 and 8 p.m. Friday and Saturday at the Oklahoma City Museum of Art’s Noble Theater, 415 Couch Drive.
Tonight’s showing will be preceded by a special pre-feature screening of the 1956 Oscar-winning short film “The Red Balloon” at 7:30. The short was the inspiration for the 2007 feature film.
For more information, call 236-3100 or go to www.okcmoa.com/film.
- BAM
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