Flight of the Red Balloon

With “Flight of the Red Balloon” Hou Hsiao-Hsien has created a jewel of lighter-than-air deception and quiet revelation that is both homage to and update of Albert Lamorisse’s beloved 1956 French classic, “The Red Balloon.” The childhood loneliness at the core of the earlier film here permeates all the characters’ lives. Despite love, desire and caring good will the characters do not connect but merely overlap. Machines and technology mediate their interactions with themselves and with each other.

In the sparkling light of a summer afternoon, a young boy, Simon, scrambles up the railing of the Place de la Bastille Metro stop. Pleading with the eponymous red balloon- off screen, above the trees- to come to him, offering a king’s ransom of 100 candies, upping the ante to 2,000 caramels, but the balloon does not respond. Accepting his loss, Simon descends into the subway.

The camera drifts upwards and a glimpse of transparent red gives the impression that the balloon is nestled or trapped in the elaborate art nouveau sculpture of the Metro entrance. But this is a false start: only the crimson-tinted globe of a period lamplight. The camera proceeds upwards and we see the too-perfect opaque orb of the red balloon that caught Simon’s eye and attention.

The balloon lingers over the requisite attractive Parisian rooftops until it comes to rest on a Metro platform, patiently awaiting Simon’s train. The train arrives, the doors open; the adults come and go, pushing the unwanted obstacle of the balloon out of their way. Simon sees the balloon hovering just inches from his grasp, but this time it is he that does not respond. The train doors close and Simon goes on his appointed way. The recurrence of the balloon is not seen as magical or surprising or meaningful. Though Simon sees the balloon, its appearance does not connect to anything inside him or to the moment just a few minutes before when the balloon was the object of desire and promised sacrifice. The balloon appears many times throughout the film, though it will never again elicit a response.

In another telling of this tale one imagines that Simon would step off the train, grab hold of the balloon and be led into a journey of the unknown, or, at least, that he might try to bring the balloon into the train, activating the metaphor of merging the “other” life into the quotidian life, with all its tandem trials and lessons. But neither happens.

Song is a Chinese film student studying in Paris. She floats down a sidewalk with the same vaguely random directionality as the balloon, momentarily fluttering in a swirl at the streets' intersection, finally coming to the address she seeks. Entering a small dark theater, she encounters the rehearsal of a Chinese-inspired puppet performance that tells of a young couple, separated by the fierce Dragon king who holds the beloved prisoner at the bottom of the sea. The lover vows to boil away the ocean into a mist of oblivion to regain his true love.

Suzanne is the magnificently nuanced and varied voices of the puppets. She is a blonde rapture of vibrant talent and too much décolletage, an incarnation of frazzled beauty and distraction. Suzanne has hired Song as sitter/nanny for her son, Simon. Together they go to pick up the boy from school and Suzanne sends them home as she returns to the theater. We come to understand the sprawling nature of Suzanne’s life; a whirl of objects and emotions without order or scale, her precision is focused only in her work. On their walk home Song tells Simon of the Red Balloon film and at that moment points out a red balloon drawn onto the side of an adjacent shop. Simon does not know of the old movie and isn't interested in the image across the street; he wants to play a game of pinball.

Lovely and imperturbable, Song floats just above engagement with Simon and Suzanne, acting often as a buffer and never at a distance too great for observation. Simon is gentle, bright and related, never withholding or fearful. Song and Simon video their daily walks and errands. Song engages the boy, fleshing out his story, neither avoiding nor pursuing any of the difficult discoveries such as Simon’s parents divorce, his father’s absence or the absence of his “sort of” sister, Louise, who lives with their grandfather in Brussels.

Later, Simon and Song enter the apartment and find the usual clutter overwhelmed by a cascade of files and papers, boxes and bags. Tearful and angry, Suzanne is on the phone, saying that she cannot find the Lease Agreement, that since her husband left she cannot find where he put it or remember if she might have moved it. Suddenly the impermanence expressed in Song’s foreignness and Simon’s absent family is transferred to Suzanne herself; domestic security, apparently, is another thing of the past.

The puppet rehearsal continues and we see the undaunted young lover ladling cup after cup of seawater into a boiling pot. 2,500- 4,652 ladles of water, he counts as he goes, his ardor undiminished. A magical Genie appears, all hair and arms. To reward the young man’s effort and dedication the genie offers a magical golden coin that will help drain the ocean, forcing the Dragon king to release the beloved. In this second view there is an ominous discordance. Of course we want the young man to regain his true love, but we live in a world where technology has made actual and possible that which before was merely metaphor. Is the young man now a sociopath intent on achieving his goal at the cost to the world of the very ocean of life?

We learn that Song is making a film of a red balloon for her school project and Simon, dressed all in green, is helping by carrying the balloon. Song explains that green is a very easy color to erase digitally, so that she can make it appear that the balloon is traveling of its own volition. Suddenly the magic of the red balloon is entirely gone.

The problem of the Lease Agreement concerns the downstairs neighbor who doesn’t pay his rent; Suzanne owns that apartment as well. It had been her mother’s, and she will need it when Louise returns to Paris for school, deftly indicating that Suzanne herself is the product of a broken home. She finds the Lease Agreement and must now begin the process to force the errant downstairs neighbor to release her apartment; true love is replaced with property. It turns out that Louise does not want to come back to Paris for school, and one can see why. Her mother’s world is messy, complex and costly in many ways to herself and everyone around her. Though Suzanne is generous in emotion and substance, hers is an outmoded style, not technologically clean, not so easy to erase.

Set into the filigree of this family story is a scene of a Chinese puppet master giving a demonstration, organized by Suzanne, for a small group of students. The master's movements are so few and so slight it appears that the cloth and carved-wood doll really is a living being for whom the puppeteer has merely been so kind as to cup his hands, creating a tiny stage for the little performer to enact his scene. The puppet master appears to be doing nothing more than assisting the puppet to do what it wants, a humble gesture of loving helpfulness.

On a school trip to the Musee d’Orsay Simon’s class looks at a painting of a scene from the turn of the last century- a child chases a red ball in a dark and verdant park. In the distance, across a silent pond, a young adult couple can be seen. Who might these people be- the watching parents? More importantly, where is the artist standing, from where is the scene depicted, high above? Is the painting happy or sad? A little of both, one student replies, as Simon gazes up through the gallery’s skylight at the red balloon that flutters just above the glass. It has followed him throughout the film and, as before, he has no response to seeing it again, nor to the co-incidence- synchronicity- of seeing it represented in the painting even as it hovers above, embodying the artist's point of view.

The endless variety and sophistication of technology has robbed the world of its voice for magic and the extraordinary. In one scene Simon is “drawing” Louise through a projector device that allows him to trace her outline on an affixed sheet of paper; he looks into the machine, not at her. Suzanne peers through the viewfinder of her camera to record this fleeting moment of quiet childhood togetherness; like the scattered family it will not last.

One imagines, if one doesn’t know the effect first-hand, that to Simon, brought up with technology and totally conversant with its varied modalities, seeing the red balloon now here, now there, can carry no meaning because he cannot differentiate these occurrences from the sequential and random representations on a screen while web or channel surfing or gaming. His range of expression is limited to pressing buttons and moving “mice”; all of which breaks down barriers of conventional vision while subtly directing and coercing as it robs vision of its capacity to see anew, differently, or to persist on a path of one's own making. Since anything can always appear anywhere at any time, no particular appearance is significant.