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.
Saturday, April 12, 2008
Sunday, April 6, 2008
Contempt (Le Mepris)
Forty-five years later Godard’s masterpiece, “Contempt”, remains a startling visual stylization, majestically interweaving cool piercing intellect with surprising emotional breadth and depth.
Ostensibly a film within a film, the opening scene credits Godard’s film about the making of Fritz Lang’s film of “The Odyssey”. Lang, playing himself, is glorious as actor, director, Greek chorus and Tiresias all rolled into one man of heart and vision.
Piccoli and Bardot, the young married couple Paul and Camille, are to some extent merely stand-ins for the characters they play. They are not required to render real performances any more than the actors in Lang’s “Odyssey” are required to do more than place their bodies within the frame of the camera’s gaze. These actors represent pawns in a game played by the gods. So, too, forces beyond their control and understanding buffet about the actors, directors and the young couple in the “real life” of Godard’s epic journey. To be discordant is in keeping with the modern fractured world.
Bardot is never more sublimely empty than in the scene showing her smoldering nude body stretched out across a bed glowing in voluptuous semi-darkness. It is the first of many different versions of contempt. In the mumbled tones of intimate after-love, Camille inventories her own formidable physical assets, asking Paul if he loves each body part she enumerates. With her laundry list of skin and bones, she is plainly telling him that this transient envelope of existence is all of her that there is to be known.
She suspects him, even now, of not being entirely fulfilled in the thrall of the perfect specimen of the machine of her body. Her contempt is also for becoming a real woman beyond the perversely conventional dichotomy of wife/femme fatale. All she can do is try on a black wig; in her world, a different look is the closest she can get to a different dimension.
Paul asserts that he loves each part of her equally, from which she concludes in dead earnest that he therefore loves her completely. He agrees, adding, “tragically.” Matching her black wig, he has adopted the look of a black hat in the hopes of inheriting some of Dean Martin’s charisma and success. It is his effort to acquire a desired aspect rather than discover his own character.
Paul pretends that he is a serious writer rather than a hack journeyman for hire. Though he knows how to secure a reasonably hefty paycheck and to play hard to get, what he has to offer is a list of decaying literary attributes as lifeless as Camille’s body parts. If he at an earlier time aspired to even a modicum of artistic achievement, he turned out to be no more than an avenue for someone else’s prosaic imagination to travel on. The longevity of his market value will not exceed Camille’s. Neither has the substance without which personal destiny has no core.
Camille and Paul’s story mimics in pathetic dis-similarity the story of Ulysses and Penelope. Paul has been asked by a famous American producer, Jerry Prokosch- played with over-sized vulgarity and ceaseless narcissistic zeal by Jack Palance- to rewrite the script for Lang’s film to make it sexier and “new.” Prokosch invites the couple to his villa for a drink, taking the beautiful young wife in his little red sports car while vaguely suggesting that Paul come along in a cab. Camille is hesitant; Paul insists she go, that he will follow. She exudes the uncertainty and anger of being even temporarily unclaimed by the designated other. The spell of her and Paul’s magical interlude is broken; she cannot forgive.
Paul’s cab ride, like Ulysses' journey, doesn’t go as planned. The taxi gets into an accident. To find another cab he has to walk for 20 minutes from the Castello Sant’Angelo to the Piazza Venezia. He is half an hour late. With the heartless brevity redolent of contemporary attention deficit disorder, Ulysses’ decade of meaningful wandering and development has been reduced to thirty pointless minutes. These few minutes of unexpected waiting have stretched Camille beyond her resources. Paul makes matters worse by flirting with the producer’s attractive assistant/interpreter. Each knows that this day has revealed something neither of them wanted to discover.
Paul quotes Dante’s lines about Ulysses' last voyage: “We rejoiced, but soon our joy turned to grief…and the sea closed in on us.” Perhaps the most concise poetic description of the journey of life and a virtual blueprint description of Paul and Camille's fate, this oracle is followed by the spectacularly oppositional imagery of the harsh and dry opaque verticality of the rocky cliffs of the island of Capri partly encircling and overshadowing a tiny cove of brilliant, glistening deep turquoise water.
For Lang, Ulysses’ character cannot be changed without changing the entire nature and substance of the story- it would no longer be the Odyssey. That Ulysses could not restrain his desire to gain experience of the world despite his love for his family and known world was the instantiation of his desire to know himself; he and his world are inseparable. Lang’s interpretation and understanding of the Odyssey and of Ulysses is of no interest to the American producer. Prokosch wants to re-envision the context of the Odyssey with Ulysses restyled as a modern man, an everyday neurotic. Secretly unhappy with Penelope and suspecting her fidelity, in this version Ulysses goes off to war, not bothering to hurry home after the victory and only killing all his wife’s suitors in order to save face. Prokosch’s Ulysses is a clever, defensive ambler, irrelevant in an uncaring world, responding as best he can to gain advantage or evade the unwanted.
Paul resonates with this convenient view of Ulysses’ fate for it will explain why Camille no longer loves him. Paul’s boredom, thoughtless over-confidence, carelessness, and meaningless flirting have produced her disdain. That this idea makes no sense doesn’t matter. It fits the modern concept of mechanistic cause and effect, lacks entirely any sense of responsible volition and obviates any deeper understanding of or inquiries about the nature of love and desire. Camille responds by flirting with Prokosch partly to punish Paul, but more because she has no other persona to enact or call upon.
Camille recalls idyllic images of their earlier happiness: a simple, uncomplicated and unconscious love of unboundaried bliss and pleasant delirium. Paul envisions a time when Camille would no longer love him, but the corresponding image is of her perfect unchanged nude body, suppliant as always. She dreams of the past; he begins to imagine a different future.
The young couple argues. Paul asks Camille why she no longer loves him and her reply is that she would rather die than tell. However, barely a few minutes pass before she does tell: she hates him because he is incapable of moving her. Camille’s contempt is akin to hating god for not being more god-like. As if denouncing a false god for his impotence, she does not see that the error and responsibility are her own. She no longer loves Paul because he is just a man. Previously she placed him in the position of a god, or, at least, co-conspirator in their undifferentiated and repetitive unconscious instinctual vitality. Now she finds he cannot make her love him any more than a god can make someone believe or worship sincerely. She feels abandoned and is incapable of moving in any direction on her own. She needs the other to move her, even as she resists. Prokosch’s large gestures may be empty and false, but they are unambiguous and predictable. It is no surprise when she goes off with the American; their fates are sealed in their separate yet equal inabilities to find another dimension or view of themselves. Endless repetition requires no next scene and the handsome runaway couple meet a sudden and unglamorous end in a highway accident: the little red sports car crushed like crumpled paper in the gigantic rig of a tractor-trailer, the two bodies slumped like discarded dolls.
Lang’s deeply human and humane character reminds us that man can only be human. Dante echoes again; man is not made to live like a brute, but to follow virtue and knowledge: to aspire to them, to keep them ever in our sight.
In the final scene of Godard’s film Paul has found the letter from Camille and he, too, prepares to depart. On the rooftop terrace of the Capri villa, Lang is shooting the end of his film; he describes it to Paul as that moment when Ulysses first sees his homeland. The actor playing Ulysses, barely more than a prop himself, moves sideways across the edge of the terrace. The camera sweeps along with him and then finally past him, out to a pure uninterrupted view of the horizon of sky and sea. Nothing and everything is there. The film has come full circle back to its own beginning as Ulysses eventually comes back to Ithaca. It is no mere return, the place and man are no longer the same, each is new and more. To find his way home Ulysses must first see his home in his mind’s eye, exactly as the artist must first see the vision of his work.
Ostensibly a film within a film, the opening scene credits Godard’s film about the making of Fritz Lang’s film of “The Odyssey”. Lang, playing himself, is glorious as actor, director, Greek chorus and Tiresias all rolled into one man of heart and vision.
Piccoli and Bardot, the young married couple Paul and Camille, are to some extent merely stand-ins for the characters they play. They are not required to render real performances any more than the actors in Lang’s “Odyssey” are required to do more than place their bodies within the frame of the camera’s gaze. These actors represent pawns in a game played by the gods. So, too, forces beyond their control and understanding buffet about the actors, directors and the young couple in the “real life” of Godard’s epic journey. To be discordant is in keeping with the modern fractured world.
Bardot is never more sublimely empty than in the scene showing her smoldering nude body stretched out across a bed glowing in voluptuous semi-darkness. It is the first of many different versions of contempt. In the mumbled tones of intimate after-love, Camille inventories her own formidable physical assets, asking Paul if he loves each body part she enumerates. With her laundry list of skin and bones, she is plainly telling him that this transient envelope of existence is all of her that there is to be known.
She suspects him, even now, of not being entirely fulfilled in the thrall of the perfect specimen of the machine of her body. Her contempt is also for becoming a real woman beyond the perversely conventional dichotomy of wife/femme fatale. All she can do is try on a black wig; in her world, a different look is the closest she can get to a different dimension.
Paul asserts that he loves each part of her equally, from which she concludes in dead earnest that he therefore loves her completely. He agrees, adding, “tragically.” Matching her black wig, he has adopted the look of a black hat in the hopes of inheriting some of Dean Martin’s charisma and success. It is his effort to acquire a desired aspect rather than discover his own character.
Paul pretends that he is a serious writer rather than a hack journeyman for hire. Though he knows how to secure a reasonably hefty paycheck and to play hard to get, what he has to offer is a list of decaying literary attributes as lifeless as Camille’s body parts. If he at an earlier time aspired to even a modicum of artistic achievement, he turned out to be no more than an avenue for someone else’s prosaic imagination to travel on. The longevity of his market value will not exceed Camille’s. Neither has the substance without which personal destiny has no core.
Camille and Paul’s story mimics in pathetic dis-similarity the story of Ulysses and Penelope. Paul has been asked by a famous American producer, Jerry Prokosch- played with over-sized vulgarity and ceaseless narcissistic zeal by Jack Palance- to rewrite the script for Lang’s film to make it sexier and “new.” Prokosch invites the couple to his villa for a drink, taking the beautiful young wife in his little red sports car while vaguely suggesting that Paul come along in a cab. Camille is hesitant; Paul insists she go, that he will follow. She exudes the uncertainty and anger of being even temporarily unclaimed by the designated other. The spell of her and Paul’s magical interlude is broken; she cannot forgive.
Paul’s cab ride, like Ulysses' journey, doesn’t go as planned. The taxi gets into an accident. To find another cab he has to walk for 20 minutes from the Castello Sant’Angelo to the Piazza Venezia. He is half an hour late. With the heartless brevity redolent of contemporary attention deficit disorder, Ulysses’ decade of meaningful wandering and development has been reduced to thirty pointless minutes. These few minutes of unexpected waiting have stretched Camille beyond her resources. Paul makes matters worse by flirting with the producer’s attractive assistant/interpreter. Each knows that this day has revealed something neither of them wanted to discover.
Paul quotes Dante’s lines about Ulysses' last voyage: “We rejoiced, but soon our joy turned to grief…and the sea closed in on us.” Perhaps the most concise poetic description of the journey of life and a virtual blueprint description of Paul and Camille's fate, this oracle is followed by the spectacularly oppositional imagery of the harsh and dry opaque verticality of the rocky cliffs of the island of Capri partly encircling and overshadowing a tiny cove of brilliant, glistening deep turquoise water.
For Lang, Ulysses’ character cannot be changed without changing the entire nature and substance of the story- it would no longer be the Odyssey. That Ulysses could not restrain his desire to gain experience of the world despite his love for his family and known world was the instantiation of his desire to know himself; he and his world are inseparable. Lang’s interpretation and understanding of the Odyssey and of Ulysses is of no interest to the American producer. Prokosch wants to re-envision the context of the Odyssey with Ulysses restyled as a modern man, an everyday neurotic. Secretly unhappy with Penelope and suspecting her fidelity, in this version Ulysses goes off to war, not bothering to hurry home after the victory and only killing all his wife’s suitors in order to save face. Prokosch’s Ulysses is a clever, defensive ambler, irrelevant in an uncaring world, responding as best he can to gain advantage or evade the unwanted.
Paul resonates with this convenient view of Ulysses’ fate for it will explain why Camille no longer loves him. Paul’s boredom, thoughtless over-confidence, carelessness, and meaningless flirting have produced her disdain. That this idea makes no sense doesn’t matter. It fits the modern concept of mechanistic cause and effect, lacks entirely any sense of responsible volition and obviates any deeper understanding of or inquiries about the nature of love and desire. Camille responds by flirting with Prokosch partly to punish Paul, but more because she has no other persona to enact or call upon.
Camille recalls idyllic images of their earlier happiness: a simple, uncomplicated and unconscious love of unboundaried bliss and pleasant delirium. Paul envisions a time when Camille would no longer love him, but the corresponding image is of her perfect unchanged nude body, suppliant as always. She dreams of the past; he begins to imagine a different future.
The young couple argues. Paul asks Camille why she no longer loves him and her reply is that she would rather die than tell. However, barely a few minutes pass before she does tell: she hates him because he is incapable of moving her. Camille’s contempt is akin to hating god for not being more god-like. As if denouncing a false god for his impotence, she does not see that the error and responsibility are her own. She no longer loves Paul because he is just a man. Previously she placed him in the position of a god, or, at least, co-conspirator in their undifferentiated and repetitive unconscious instinctual vitality. Now she finds he cannot make her love him any more than a god can make someone believe or worship sincerely. She feels abandoned and is incapable of moving in any direction on her own. She needs the other to move her, even as she resists. Prokosch’s large gestures may be empty and false, but they are unambiguous and predictable. It is no surprise when she goes off with the American; their fates are sealed in their separate yet equal inabilities to find another dimension or view of themselves. Endless repetition requires no next scene and the handsome runaway couple meet a sudden and unglamorous end in a highway accident: the little red sports car crushed like crumpled paper in the gigantic rig of a tractor-trailer, the two bodies slumped like discarded dolls.
Lang’s deeply human and humane character reminds us that man can only be human. Dante echoes again; man is not made to live like a brute, but to follow virtue and knowledge: to aspire to them, to keep them ever in our sight.
In the final scene of Godard’s film Paul has found the letter from Camille and he, too, prepares to depart. On the rooftop terrace of the Capri villa, Lang is shooting the end of his film; he describes it to Paul as that moment when Ulysses first sees his homeland. The actor playing Ulysses, barely more than a prop himself, moves sideways across the edge of the terrace. The camera sweeps along with him and then finally past him, out to a pure uninterrupted view of the horizon of sky and sea. Nothing and everything is there. The film has come full circle back to its own beginning as Ulysses eventually comes back to Ithaca. It is no mere return, the place and man are no longer the same, each is new and more. To find his way home Ulysses must first see his home in his mind’s eye, exactly as the artist must first see the vision of his work.
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