The new Paris-set film The Flight of the Red Balloon has one of the odder background stories of recent films. It's the first movie directed in the West by the revered Taiwan-based filmmaker Hou Hsiao-hsien, and is the first of a projected series of movies to be funded by the Paris museum, the Musée d’Orsay. It was reportedly the museum's idea that Hsiao-hsien "remake" Albert Lamorisee's 1956 children's classic The Red Balloon, a short (thirty-four minute) film in which the brightly colored title prop magically follows a small boy through the city. It turned out that Hsiao-hsien had never seen it. The movie he wound up making uses the city and the figure of a small boy and the image of a mysterious red balloon as a kind of tribute to Lamorisee, but mostly as a sort of homage to unversally shared memory, and overlapping creative imagination. In a scene towards the end, the boy--Simon, played by Simon Iteanu--is part of a group that visits the Musée d’Orsay and is shown an 1899 painting by Félix Vallotton’s called “Le Ballon,” which shows a child and a bright red ball; it could almost be itself a reference to the movie that Albert Lamorisee would make more than fifty years later.
The central characters besides Simon are his mother (Juliette Binoche), who works with a puppet theater and lives with her son in a cramped apartment overflowing with books and photos and a piano that needs tuning, and Son (Song Fang), Simon's nanny, a Chinese film student who is working on her own video tribute to Lamorisse, or at least to his city and subject matter. Five years ago, Hsiao-hsien made Café Lumière, another feature-length tribute to an earlier filmmaker, Yasujiro Ozu. Flight of the Red Balloon seems to me to be a much better movie, partly because it's less studied and freer but also because it takes the director farther out of his comfort zone. Hsiao-hsien likes a measured pace, and his films always suggest more than they show. Here, Simon and Song create a still, quiet pool at the center of the film that's pure Hsiao-hsien, but there's a storm forming at the edges in the unexpected form of Juliette Binoche. The delicate-featured Binoche has made her image and her career playing waifs, but she clearly saw this single-mother role as her chance to play, for lack of a better word, a broad, and she runs with it. (She's said that she took inspiration for the role from Gena Rowlands, and in tribute to that actress, she appears her with her dark hair dyed a frowzy-looking blond.) UNsure how to write dialogue or coach the performers in a language in which he isn't fluent, Hsiao-hsien worked in close collaboration with the actors on this picture, setting up the perimeters of scenes and then letting them improvise their way through, and Binoche turns out to thrive in this kind of working environment. She gets to show a new capacity for ferocity here, especially in her telephone monologues, which fill in some contextual back story about as fully and lucidly as it ever gets filled in during a Hsiao-hsien movie. Binoche looks as if she's having more fun than she's ever had in a movie before when she's rampaging around the apartment warring with the neighbors or providing funny voices backstage at the puppet shows. Her softer side is reserved for her son, whose unspoken adoration of her is fully believable. It's still early in the year, but Flight of the Red Balloon makes Juliette Binoche a prime contender for the Movie Mother of the Year award.
