RasoirJ on The Flight of the Red Balloon

The Flight of the Red Balloon (2007) **

Be wary of New York Times critics who plug French films. NYT critic Manola Darghis gives this one 4.5 stars and describes it as “the latest wonderment from the Taiwanese master Hou Hsiao-hsien.” Hmmm. Guess this is the sort of movie that separates the cineastes from the real movie-goers, as Sarah Palin might say.

For me this flic needs a warning label, something like: “Caution: wistful, enigmatically symbolic French bushwa at its most pretentious.” What’s more, it’s filled with puppetry, magic realism, and a curly-haired little boy so pretty as to be indistinguishable from a little girl. The plot is easy to summarize – nothing much happens. Mostly, the kid and his Chinese baby-sitter, a film student with video camera in hand, hang out on the streets of Paris. And there’s this hovering red balloon – apparently left over from a famous 1956 French short that won an Oscar. The balloon is definitely a character, though an enigmatic one since it never speaks. Mr. Red Balloon is like a special friend of lonely kids or something.

The only thing that feels real here is the great Juliette Binoche playing a single-parent mom. She’s a dreamer, always scrambling for money, living in a teeny disorderly apartment, with little time for the kid. Her job? Puppet actress – I kid you not – a tough way to make a living. The movie’s big action scenes are things like a neighbor invading the tiny kitchen to cook mutton stew, piano movers carrying a piano up steps, a blind piano tuner doing his thing, little slices of a little life. Just when boredom began to reach the truly unbearable level for me, the cumulative portrait of the Juliette B character clicked.

I also began to appreciate the director’s sense of the slow, infinite time of childhood, and the streets of Paris are always a wonderful backdrop. Still, be prepared.