Not Coming to a Theater Near You

Flight of the Red Balloon / Le Voyage du ballon rouge / The Red Balloon / France / 2007

Had the opening scene—of the titular red balloon following Simon through the streets of Paris—been the entire film, all 117 minutes, I probably would have left the theatre a little teary-eyed. The magic in film that evokes the innocence and wonderment of childhood is very rare today—perhaps the rarest of cinematic species. Studios try to replicate that feeling—mass-produce it with characters they think we’ll love—but never succeed, because it never feels like anything other than desperation. For money, for notoriety, for awards, for the number-one spot on the Box Office Top 10. I clearly remember watching The Wizard of Oz as a child and being enamored by every aspect, a feeling I later felt when I watched other films like Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory and Disney’s The Sword in the Stone. The Flight of the Red Balloon, while not perfect—and after those opening seven or eight minutes, nothing director Hou Hsiao-hsien could do would ever be—revived, at least for a while, those feelings of astonishment I very rarely feel for movies today. (Feelings, I should note, I had felt only days before, when Suzie Templeton’s Peter and the Wolf was broadcast on PBS.)

I realize my thoughts on Hou’s film are bumbling and overly sentimental, and I’ve spent the last month trying to write something better—more broad, more analytical. But I couldn’t, probably because my friends and I watched this film in a theatre that is slowly but visibly showing its age: Chipped walls, scuffed and soiled floors, broken chairs, a stage curtain held together by duct tape. Never a more apt metaphor for the sad state of magical films.

by Adam Balz | Source: 35MM Theatrical Print
06 May 2008 12:37 PM | Comments (1)

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1. Warren Oates / 9 May 2008 / 5:05 PM

   I know that the film is inspired by the famous children’s short and I have to agree with you that it isn’t very good, but maybe not entirely for the reasons you cite. Hou’s other movies have been more about close observation and immersion in the moments of everyday life. I’ve never found them dreamy or magical. The one other moment in the whole film that gets anywhere close to the feeling of childhood is the scene near the end when the kid takes a nap in the loft. Otherwise, it’s the same kind of long-take people walking in and out of the oft-static frame kind of film as Goodbye South, Goodbye or Flowers of Shanghai. I don’t think I’ll ever feel like revisiting this film like I do some of Hou’s others. But I do have to at least give him some credit for not being wildly out of his element even in a different country and a foreign language.