Taking Flight

Hou Hsiao-hsien's quiet nod to The Red Balloon soars on its own.

by Cindy Fuchs

Recommended

HEAD OVER HELIUM: A red balloon follows Simon (Simon Iteanu), a sign of his desire for constant companionship. (CLICK IMAGE FOR LARGER VERSION)

"I'm fairly easygoing," says Suzanne (Juliette Binoche). "You don't need to be formal." Her offscreen voice trails over a shot from inside a vehicle, making its way through a Parisian tunnel. An actress and single mom, Suzanne is soon revealed to be anything but "easygoing," as she's struggling to maintain her career and look after 7-year-old Simon (Simon Iteanu). Toward all these ends, she's hired a new nanny, Song (Song Fang), whom she means to reassure as they zip through traffic en route to pick up Simon from school.

Song, a film student from China, is as quiet and observant as Suzanne is expressive and self-absorbed. During her first conversation with Simon, she names the inspiration for The Flight of the Red Balloon. "It's a really old film," she says, "from 1956." The boy doesn't know it, but he's living something like it. Like Pascal in Albert Lamorisse's The Red Balloon, he's followed through his day by a balloon: It hovers and tilts, passing rooftops and trees, a gently allusive sign of the child's imagination and ingenuous desire for undistracted companionship.

Repeatedly framed by doorways and windows, each character in Hou Hsiao-hsien's film exists in a separate space, but they also reach toward one another. As Song shoots and edits her own film, an homage to Lamorisse starring Simon, Suzanne frets over phone calls to her boyfriend in Montreal and Simon plays video games or endures piano lessons. Suzanne is alternately fragile and fierce, with Song's newness to the family granting a delicacy to the film's observation. Hou Hsiao-hsien's signature long takes reveal details as if by accident: While the women talk offscreen, the camera studies Simon, quietly waiting at the dining table.

Glimpsing Song's movie on her laptop, Suzanne's focus shifts from her unknowable future to her forgotten past. "I found it very touching," she says. "It reminded me of my childhood." At another point, Simon recalls an afternoon with his sister (Louise Margolin), now living with her father in Brussels. The film slips from the present to his past, the siblings crossing a bridge, their chatter tender and silly. "She's my pretend sister," Simon tells Song, "because my parents divorced." As relationships and reflections slip into and out of one another, they are revealed as potent and elusive.

(c_fuchs@citypaper.net)

The Red Balloon (Le Voyage du Ballon Rouge)

Directed by Hou Hsiao-hsien

An IFC FirstTake release