“Flight of the Red Balloon” is not about story; it has none. It’s about observing people in their natural habitat, about the surprising pleasures of everyday life, and about the way locations can change on you just when you thought you’d got them figured out.
In those ways, it’s like “The Red Balloon,” the delightful 1956 short film from France (recently restored and written about here), which has been shown in grade schools everywhere since it was made. This new feature is “inspired” by that classic.
But the reception of the two movies will be pretty different. This new feature is delicate and exquisite in its own way, but it’s a more difficult film to like.
“Flight” is the first European offering from director Hou Hsiao-hsien, a critically acclaimed filmmaker whose art reached an extraordinary zenith in 1998’s “Flowers of Shanghai.” “Flight” is a series of long, slow domestic scenes, most of them set inside a wonderfully cluttered Paris apartment, where we watch life unfold for a woman (Juliette Binoche, late of “Dan in Real Life”) and her young son (Simon Iteanu).
He’s like the boy in “The Red Balloon,” and he does see a mysterious balloon hovering in his neighborhood. But Hou’s film does the opposite of conjuring childhood magic. It goes to great pains to show you how things really work.
The woman is an actress with a puppet show, but we don’t watch the presentation, we see it from behind the scenes, with the wires showing. Another scene has a long bit about a piano tuner working on a piano. In another, we watch crepes being made, bit by bit.
This will drive some viewers to distraction, but if you have a taste for freshness (and the kind of immediate, spontaneous acting Binoche has always been good at), you might find it fascinating. We see Binoche’s apartment from one angle only through much of the movie, and when the camera finally turns around and shows us the rest of the place, it’s a weirdly exciting moment.
It’s as though Hou is making a reverse-image movie, demonstrating that the tidy stories and polished surfaces of regular movies are just so much puppet play. By showing us all the strings, I think he’s inviting us to have an experience that isn’t manipulative and pre-ordained, but open-ended. It’s a little movie, given weight by the splendid Juliette Binoche. But if you like poetic cinema, try it.
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