By Armond White

Flight of the Red Balloon
Directed by Hou Hsiao Hsien

Right now, the best movie in town is Stephen Chow’s CJ7, the most charming art film about childhood since Jean-Marie Straub’s En Rachâchant. Chow knows something basic about movies: That the qualities that make a good children’s film are the same as those of a good adult film. Hou Hsiao Hsien, Taiwanese director of academic art flicks, competes with Chow in his new project Flight of the Red Balloon; but, let’s put this kindly, Hou lacks the common touch.

In Flight of the Red Balloon, Hou does a variation on Albert Lamorisse’s 1956 short “The Red Balloon,” the classic children’s film about a Parisian schoolboy who develops a symbiotic relationship with a persistent, floating red sphere. Lamorisse’s film became a touchstone largely because it introduced many generations of children to the glorious rigors of art movies and foreign-language films. It was the cinematic equivalent of Prokofiev’s concert piece Peter and the Wolf. Yet when you re-watch “The Red Balloon” as an adult (the movie’s now available on a Janus Films DVD), it becomes a gently powerful anecdote about life.

Lamorrise’s themes—loneliness, personality, friendship, difference, loss, compassion and the unknown—are also ideas that Chow’s CJ7 and Spielberg’s E.T. put in popular terms. Hou botches the opportunity with remote, theoretical cinema making: Simon (Simon Iteanu), a modern-day Parisian boy, notices the random appearance of a floating balloon during walks with Song (Song Fang), his Chinese nanny, or between his piano lessons, PlayStation bouts and observations of his mother, Suzanne (Juliette Binoche), warring with his estranged father.
Hou connects childlike wonder to the stress of contemporary consciousness. Suzanne’s exasperated apology to her son, “Adults are complicated,” implicitly apologizes for Hou’s academicism (while CJ7, E.T. and En Rachâchant provided clarity). Although Flight has lovely, casual rhythms (boats on the Seine underscored with tinkling piano music), it is also overwrought and ultimately enervating—the typical Hou meditation. I chide Hou’s anti-pop manner only because he flaunts it. His style reduces the wonder of daily experience to a series of pre-planned parallels: park sauntering and train rides; Simon’s memories of his half-sister juxtapose Suzanne’s own childhood memories; Suzanne’s professional puppet troupe corresponds to Song’s own interpretive profession. Hou uses Song’s film-student video background to jack up these parallels into meta-cinema. (Song calls “The Red Balloon,” “a really old movie”—sop to art-film geeks obsessed with what they think is new.)

Flight never penetrates child and pop consciousness; luckily Hou has Binoche to ballast his vague meanderings. Binoche pinpoints emotion across Hou’s undifferentiated compositions. Her understatement is firm. She’s poignant and readable, projecting thoughts clearly as a child while doing several things at once. It’s a great actress playing not only an actress but also a surrogate for the director’s egotism. Suzanne compliments Song’s student film (ìit recalled personal things for meî), which is probably how Hou felt about Lamorisse’s movie before his arrogance kicked in. Like Terry Gilliam’s 12 Monkeys (a two-hour adaptation of Chris Marker’s 28-minute La Jetée), Hou’s Lamorisse remake lasts longer than the original—but says less.