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"Balloon" has more bad gas than the Hindenberg
(Reuters)
Updated: 2007-05-25 14:06 CANNES - Albert Lamorisse's transcendent 1956 film "Le Ballon Rouge" is more vital than this hodgepodge homage from Taipei filmmaker Hou Hsiao Hsien.
Bad hair, rather than the pliant red balloon, is the central image of this dolorous monotony. Hou shoots mostly from the side, so we're constantly subjected to the side profiles of all the players: the beatific kid, Simon (Simon Iteanu); the frazzled mother, Suzanne ( Juliette Binoche); the implacable Chinese nanny, Song (Song Fang); and the melanges of mangy others. Such a sideways visual strategy does little to draw us to the characters, and, most egregiously, we never come to care about this modern-day family. In this demi-ditty, mop-haired Simon is a quiet kid who endures stoically the shrill hysterics of his theatrical mother. He tries to draw away into his own world of old-style pinball games, but he's undeniably stunted by his crummy family life and his mother's relentlessly flaky hysterics. Rounding out this familial menagerie is Song, a stoic film student who acts as the boy's nanny while the mother is preoccupied with her career as a vocal artist for a puppet company. Without delineating the details of this family portrait, suffice it to say that Hou has further enervated the already drab proceedings with dull padding: a piano lesson for beginner Simon, or several snatches of Simon's simple pleasure, playing pinball. Other banalities abound, in large part courtesy to the conceit of not writing dialogue in the script and the choice of shooting in long or side shot. Unfortunately, Hou does not merge these aesthetics by mitigating the bad dialogue by shooting it long, out of earshot. The imagery of the classic movie, where a spirited red balloon wafts unpredictably over Paris, never even attempts to reach a metaphorical height, nor does it even engage us compositionally. For the most part, the heart of the classic is transmuted through the film-student lens of the foreign film student, such is the minimalist scope of this piffle. In her performance as the dark-rooted, bottle-blond, mother artiste, Binoche soars. She delivers a wondrously conflicted gaggle of emotions and movements. Archly irritating, she is nonetheless sympathetic in her flailing. As such, the film might be retro-titled from "Red Balloon" to "Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown." Indeed, since the balloon does not appear all that often, a few snippets of the editor's tool might align this movie mess, at least in theme, with another grander film with at least a more similar theme. As the beatific child, Iteanu sports a thick and tossed neo-Beatles look and seems to have an intriguing face, when we're permitted to see it. However, his performance, if he delivered one, is obscured by the obscure framings and, most clearly, Hou's tenuous grasp on trying to figure out what movie he was making, or in this case, what classic film he was defiling. Cast: Suzanne: Juliette Binoche Simon: Simon Iteanu Song: Song Fang Marc: Hippolyte Girardo Louise: Louise Margolin Director: Hou Hsiao Hsien; Screenwriters: Hou Hsiao Hsien, Francois Margolin; Producers: Francois Margolin, Kristina Larsen; Directors of photography: Yorick Lesauz, Mark Lee Ping Bing; Production designer: Paul Fayard; Editors: Jean-Christophe Hym, Ching Sung Liao. |
Weighted with the dreary ballast of a heavy-themed family saga and grounded by the conceit of letting the players ad-lib their dialogue, "The Flight of the Red Balloon" drifts, poofs and ultimately flops. Audiences may rightly discern that this "Balloon" is in both form and content an egg.