Flight of the Red Balloon (Hou Hsiao-hsien, 2007)

[Jeff]

Trailer
Quicktime
YouTube

[Oedipax]

Eek. Can't say I'm a fan of the original short film or of this trailer. I haven't caught up with Three Times yet, but I thought Cafe Lumiere was wonderful. The idea of Hou working with Binoche seemed promising, and could still deliver, I hope...

[chaddoli]

Wow. That trailer is beautiful. Juliette as a blonde in a Hou film. Yum.

[Barmy]

That song ("Ching Chong"?) is incredibly annoying. However, this is the first time I'm actually looking forward to a Hou film. Glad to see he's going international. Wish more artsy directors would do the same. Like that Thai dude.

[jguitar]

That song ("Ching Chong"?) is incredibly annoying.

I doubt that they tested the song in front of a Japanese audience. It's sure to provoke a lot of merriment in Japan, given that "chin chin" is childish slang in Japan for "penis."

[foggy eyes]

Variety's Cannes report.

[miless]

Wish more artsy directors would do the same. Like that Thai dude.

Rataruang or Weerasethakul?

[foggy eyes]

Another report, and a promising one at that, from Geoff Andrew at Time Out.

[John Cope]

I'll see your Time Out review and raise you an Andrew O'Hehir.

[foggy eyes]

Fold.

[Michael Kerpan]

Here's a different perspective on Hou's new film:

[PimpPanda]

Here's a different perspective on Hou's new film:

Possibly the most comprehensive and brilliant I've seen yet - my appreciation of the film has grown exponentially!

[Michael Kerpan]

Just saw it and loved it. It had a good size audience (even beyond our entourage of six). the bad news -- a fair number of idiots who plainly shouldn't have been there.

It reminded me, not infrequently, of Rivette. Couldn't have been more pleased.

Even the one member of our party who was a Hou newbie liked it a lot.

[mattkc]

I just saw this too (for the second time), and had a similar reaction. It's just sublime. Partly it feels like a further fulfillment of the direction he started going in with Café Lumière. As for the audience - not bad on the whole, but sitting directly behind me was a small child who kept asking his mother what was happening, who is that, etc.

How did it remind you of Rivette?

[Michael Kerpan]

It reminded me of Rivette in the integration of theatrical (puppet) performance (and film making) into the story -- and in the way it handled the urban environment. but I don't think any Rivette film features children... ;~}

[Jun-Dai]

To my surprise, I liked this even better than Café Lumière. I hope that there will be a good DVD of it, since it would be really nice simply to watch segments from the film absent context, which I found to be a really lovely way to re-experience Flowers of Shanghai and to give it an expanded sense of continuity and perpetuity. I've come to like Hou Hsiao-Hsien's films more than any other current director (sorry Kore-eda, sorry WKW), and I would love nothing more than to see a retrospective at the Castro.

[Donald Trampoline]

To my surprise, I liked this even better than Café Lumière. I hope that there will be a good DVD of it, since it would be really nice simply to watch segments from the film absent context, which I found to be a really lovely way to re-experience Flowers of Shanghai and to give it an expanded sense of continuity and perpetuity. I've come to like Hou Hsiao-Hsien's films more than any other current director (sorry Kore-eda, sorry WKW), and I would love nothing more than to see a retrospective at the Castro.

The CineFamily here in L.A. is doing a mini-retro and that's where I saw Flight, which was excellent. I really loved the ending sequence. Can we discuss that here? Do we need to use spoilers tags? How do we do those, let me know if they are required.

This is quite a depressing movie. It feels even bitter at times (like the lyrics of the ending song). It's almost like an older man looking backing at the lost innocent playful youth that the original Red Balloon movie represented. If not bitter at least very wistful.

I also wonder what people thought of the scene that Song plays of her Red Balloon movie, which seems impossible for her to have filmed. She has a scene where she mentions a greenscreen guy holding it, but then her film as represented here is a complete fantasy of any film she could make, since the balloon is shown climbing much higher than a green-screen guy could hold it, and as far as shooting, we have only seen her filming very simply with the boy. In other words, what is the meaning behind showing her video film in this way, I wonder. (I also can't imagine her actually getting organized and having a greenscreen guy.)

There are a lot of elements in this film. I didn't even touch on Juliette Binoche or the puppet stuff. I think it's a difficult movie that requires a lot of thinking (or discussion) to integrate it all and get its meanings.

[che-etienne]

Yeah, that's a super mini-retro, and very intelligently programmed. These three films comprise his most recent work, excepting "Three Times", which, without having seen it, strikes me more as an omnibus of settings, themes, and figures from his earlier career, or a capstone to some of these and a turning of the page to more current issues. But these three (Millenium Mambo, Cafe Lumiere, Red Balloon) are so much more preoccupied with matters of currency and take as their figures of study models from the younger generation. Globalization, and the possibility of a global, cosmopolitan culture is a definite concern here, even if less pointedly than in, say, Jia Zhang-Ke films.

[Michael Kerpan]

I didn't find this depressing at all -- quite the contrary.

[mattkc]

Globalization, and the possibility of a global, cosmopolitan culture is a definite concern here

I think you've pointed out a concern of his recent work that corresponds with what his visual "style" (man, I hate that word) has slowly been progressing towards all along. Sounds and light gelled together by movement, events/people/spaces inseparable in one whole, now an urban landscape, interwoven by time.

I think this is most true of Cafe Lumiere, Three Times, and especially Red Balloon. What I wouldn't give to see more of his films in prints (Red Balloon being my first and only).

[ptmd]

What I wouldn't give to see more of his films in prints (Red Balloon being my first and only).

You'd be gaining quite a lot, because as good as Red Balloon, Three Times, and especially Cafe Lumiere are (and I love all three quite a bit), they don't hold a candle to the work that Hou was doing in the late 80s and early 90s. In my view, The Puppetmaster (1993) is the single greatest film made anywhere in the world in the past 25 years and it absolutely needs to be seen on film (and not only because the DVD is an abomination).

[John Cope]

Nice to see someone finally get this right.

A salient point, and the heart of the matter to me:

...it is longer on naturalistic detail than compelling narrative.

This may seem a naive thing to grouse about with Hou, given the fact that that is what we all supposedly want and expect from his work; but is it really? The mistaken assumption then is that his typical attention to surface detail and the quotidian is somehow some kind of end unto itself. It always serves a larger, though often sublimated, textual purposiveness. That is, in a sense, perhaps an unavoidable facet of any seemingly narrative cinema and it emerges here as well but to a significantly less meaningful degree. Cue the war of words now over what constitutes "meaningful".

Whatever the case, Cheshire is not just right but deeply appreciated for pointing out the necessity to fully weigh the merits of individual films and not just receive auteuristic product indiscriminately, which is a very real problem regardless of whether it afflicted everyone's response to this one or not (Kent Jones' analysis, for instance, was brilliant even if I ultimately disagree with his conclusions).

[foggy eyes]

Thanks for linking to Cheshire's article, John. I appreciate his approach (and like him very much as a critic), but think he's maybe a little harsh here. When he notes that

Ironically, while Flight may be regarded as finally a rather pointless Hou Hsiao-hsien film, it can also be called a striking Juliette Binoche film.

Surely it's important to remember Jones's assertion that

Many of the people who disliked Hou’s film spoke admiringly of Binoche’s performance, as if it existed in some kind of vacuum. On the contrary, it’s the precise emotional and physical layout, coupled with Hou’s subtle, seemingly discreet yet attentive long takes, that allows her presence to register with such force. If the cinematic syntax and grammar had been any less fluid, Binoche’s performance would have come off like a jewel in a rough setting.

I think this is dead on, and it certainly marks something of a departure for Hou. No performer has assumed quite such an animated and focal role in his cinema until this point, and it is precisely the relaxed, fluid long take style that serves to bring out the nuances of Binoche's performance, anchor its centrality, and negate any textual imbalance. It works beautifully, and as a result I found it very interesting to see Hou's familiar aesthetic applied to slightly different means.

You have a very valid point as well about the place of the quotidian in relation to narrative, but I have to say that the slight shift away from 'textual purposiveness' in Flight doesn't really bother me at all. I see Hou heightening his focus on the ephemerality of the everyday (quite simply, things happen as time passes), and do believe that the observation of quotidian events can offer a satisfying end unto itself - although of course it takes a director with Hou's level of sensitivity to detail and temporality in order to get an awful lot from very little. I like to see movies attempt stuff like this, and am usually pretty happy when they get somewhere with it - so this is probably just purely subjective! Also, there might be an argument that the movement away from narrativity is offset by the more concentrated attention to performance, but that's probably a bit tenuous.

Anyway, I totally agree with Jones over the following as well, as it bugged me in Cafe Lumiere too:

If there was one element of Flight of the Red Balloon on which everyone agreed, it was the utterly bewildering incongruity of the song by Camille over the film’s closing images. Exactly whose lapse in judgment this represented I have no idea, but it’s the one discordant note in a beautifully buoyant movie.

Only Apichatpong has managed get something fresh out of the lame-pop-song-at-end-of-movie trait recently with Syndromes, so hopefully Hou will put it to bed in the future.

[MarioB]

I didn't care for this film. Having not seen The Red Balloon, and only one other film by Hsiao-hsien Hou, Millennium Mambo, I'd like to think that I'm not ill-equipped to appreciate it-- film's shouldn't rely on understanding of authorship or esoteric references to other films, in any way. This criticism may be improportionate, but it's something I loathe to no end-- Film is only slightly older than 100 years and we have "artists" referencing other movies.

It has an interesting form, like someone else said, open to random viewing. The child's world stands still, and it is only when Binoche's character enters that there is something akin to a narrative thrust-- as if manifesting the purposeless vector that sometimes describes living as an adult. But what's really being described here? Another ode to childhood, of days past (the arcane film reference), to film in-itself? Other than the parental neglect, which is only implicit, the kid seems rather spoiled.

I may not be giving it a fair chance, but certain things prevent me from wanting to go further-- the self-conscious attention to everyday triviality, that space in-between things happening; also the tired motifs as in the puppet show, the filmmaker within the film, or that bit at the end concerning the painting; it seemed like the director was treating the audience like the teacher was to the kids-- it's both happy and sad, or it can be whatever you like. To its credit I found the film fittingly buoyant and irrelevant, a peculiarity passing by.

[justeleblanc]

Hi Mario,

This was my first HHH film and I was able to appreciate it enough to dive into his earlier films, so I'm not sure if you need to know enough about the original film or HHH to fully get it.

For me, I felt like a fly on the wall (or balloon in the window) watching the mother-son relationship and I was deeply moved by their story, especially when mixed with HHH's long take aesthetic.

Did you watch it in the theater or did you rent it? I hate to say it but when I watch one of his films either on my computer or on my television I need a cup of coffee beforehand. When I saw Red Balloon in the theater I was transfixed without the caffeine.