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New York Times - WHEN the Taiwanese filmmaker Hou Hsiao-hsien was commissioned to make a movie in Paris, his first outside Asia, he chose as his starting point Albert Lamorisse’s beloved 1956 short film, “The Red Balloon.” As it happens Mr. Hou, who knew Paris only from a few brief visits, discovered Lamorisse’s very French children’s classic through a fellow outsider. He read about it in “From Paris to the Moon,” a ruminative collection of dispatches by the New Yorker writer Adam Gopnik, about expatriate family life in the French capital.
In keeping with Mr. Gopnik’s depiction, the not-quite-touristy Paris of Mr. Hou’s film, “Flight of the Red Balloon” (opening Friday), is suffused with the romance and the mystery of the everyday. The movie unfolds largely in the cafes, parks and cramped apartments of the city. Like his other films, with its patiently observed and palpably lived-in locations, it has an acute, almost tactile sense of place.
Before fleshing out the story Mr. Hou decided on the actors and determined the film’s geography, taking in the layout and the street-level ambience of the neighborhoods where he would be shooting. “There’s a kind of abstract thinking in the way I work, but I need to start with something concrete, a place or a person,” he said, speaking through a translator at the Rotterdam International Film Festival in January… [Full Story]
