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Cinematical - …Like Hou’s more recent work, Flight of the Red Balloon moves a little more toward international accessibility and away from his early, uniquely Taiwanese stories. It’s of a piece with Café Lumiere (2003), for which Hou was invited to Japan to make a film in tribute to Yasujiro Ozu. For the new film, Hou comes to France to pay tribute to Albert Lamorisse’s legendary and beloved short film The Red Balloon (1956). (It’s not a terribly surprising move, given that French critics and audiences have supported Hou more passionately and for much longer than their American counterparts.) Binoche stars — in a direct reference to The Puppetmaster — as Suzanne, a writer and voice actress with a troupe of puppeteers. While her husband, a screenwriter, is away in Canada (and may or may not ever return), Suzanne hires Song (Song Fang) as a nanny for her son Simon (Simon Iteanu). Song is a Taiwanese film student who decides, while in France, to make a film about red balloons.
Miraculously, a red balloon appears every so often and floats around the Paris skyline, though Simon doesn’t appear to notice. (He plays pinball or video games instead.) The overall narrative is as aimless and wandering as the balloon. Suzanne works hard at the troupe, and she comes home frazzled, having grabbed snacks or dinner from a nearby café. Binoche is simply miraculous in this role, working in a more improvisatory method than she is used to. She’s like a hummingbird, with wild, blonde Texas housewife hair, and low-cut, leopard-skin tops, barely able to stand still or continue a conversation strand for any length of time. She forgets things and waves her hands around to help straighten her thoughts. She does things spontaneously, like move her piano upstairs so that her son’s lessons are more convenient. She allows her downstairs neighbor (also her tenant) to use her stove, but yells at him the next day. Her puppet show — which includes something about boiling the ocean dry — suits her personality perfectly… [Full Story]
