Le Voyage du Ballon Rouge

(video by xshanel)

Hou Hsiao-Hsien is the darling of French movie elite. They discovered him at the beginning of the nineties (when he already had behind him a decade of masterpieces, known only in Taiwan). Since then, French connaiseurs remained constant in keeping Hou in the top of preferences. Jean-Michel Frodon and Olivier Assayas explained well the phenomenon in their monograph.

So, after Hou made in 2003 the movie about Tokyo (Café Lumière), it was expected he would be invited to make also a movie about Paris.

I watched Hou in several interviews: he speaks only Chinese (and anyway all his movies up to Café Lumière were about Taiwan and a little bit about mainland China). So the Taiwanese Maestro took a systematic approach: he bought a book speaking about Paris and learned that Parisian fast-foods have flippers (i.e. pinball machines), and that in Jardin du Luxembourg the carousel has little rings the children catch on sticks as they ride around (just for connaisseurs: the book is Paris to the Moon, by Adam Gopnik).

Hou also got from his Parisian friends a DVD with a French movie from 1956, just to understand a bit the spirit of the place. The movie was Le Ballon Rouge of Albert Lamorisse. Fortunate choice, as this gave Hou the idea to make Le Voyage du Ballon Rouge: a movie that is very Parisian as it is very Chinese (in its finesse of depicting the magic of Paris); magic details ignored by Parisians (though they see them everyday).

Is it such a thing as the magic of Paris? And, if so, where is it to be found today? To find the answer, Hou chose to remain a Chinese in Paris, and to look for the spirit of the city from inside his Chinese spirit.

There is no real plot in the movie (which couldn't be a surprise for Hou fans): a woman (Juliette Binoche) is working in a Parisian puppet theater (specialized in Chinese puppetry); she has a son of about eight or nine (Simon Iteanu); the mother hires a nanny, a Chinese film student who's studying in Paris (Fang Song); the mother is busy and nervous; the kid is a dreamer who enjoys playing at the flippers and is befriended by a red balloon, floating quietly over the streets and houses and following the boy on his strolls; the nanny is a dreamer too, who's trying to catch with her camera that je ne sais quoi of the Parisian street.

Well, the nanny has the sudden revelation that the je ne sais quoi she's looking for can be found inside the universe of the little boy.

(http://www.pvld.mobi/movies/2009/11/le-voyage-du-ballon-rouge-aka-the-flight-of-the-red-balloon-2007)
no copyright infringement intended

And this way the Chinese film student (and watching her behind the camera, Hou Hsiao-Hsien himself) discovers the magic of streets, of small theaters and small apartments in the attics, and the discovery is for us: it is the Paris where small kids will dream always, having red balloons as companions, the Paris of dreamers of all ages and of balloons of all colors floating freely and befriending the kids; the Paris of Lamorisse and Hou. Thank you, Taiwanese Maestro!


(Hou Hsiao-Hsien)