In that the original “Red Balloon” didn’t have a plot, I’m tempted to say that the homage to that 1956 Albert Lamorisse classic (supported by the Musée d’Orsay, where the last scene with peoples occurs, mostly shot through a window, from the balloon’s perspective) “Le voyage du ballon rouge” (Flight of the Red Balloon, 2007) has more developed characters and more of a plot than the original. OK, it had better, since it’s about five times as long.

I found the original mildly interesting first as a child and again a year or so ago. I don’t revere it. I approached watching the movie on DVD partly because I am a devotee of Juliette Binoche (even blonde, as also in her appearance in another Musée d’Orsay 20th-anniversay celebration film, “L'heure d'été” (Summer Hours, 2008). My expectations were not very high, because the movie was directed by critically acclaimed Taiwanese director Hou Hsiao-Hsien (who also took a cowriting credit, though the actors were supplied no dialogue, only situations by the “screenplay”). The visual staticness of the recent movies by both the internationally recognized art-house Taiwanese directors Tsai Ming-Liang is the other) have been mind-numbingly visually static, not to mention opaque in motivation and lacking more than rudiments of a plot.

So, while many viewers found “Flight of the Red Balloon” inconsequential an dull, I was relieved by the sometimes fluid camerawork (of Lee Pin-Bing, who shot the wonderful “Buddha Bless America” and the unwonderful Hou “Millennium Mambo”) and being able to understand why the characters were doing what (what little) they were doing. I wouldn’t go so far as to call the movie entertaining, but Hou did not seem to be thumbing his nose at it, as in seemingly endlessly held shots in which characters might wander through (or not). Or, as in a scene in “Puppetmaster,” fall through the rear of the visual field.

Both Hou and Tsai — and in both cases, increasingly from either Ozu’s death or Japanese renunciation of sovereignty over Taiwan — have expressed reverence for the cinema of Ozu Yasujiro (1903-1963), who set the camera about a yard/meter above the ground and did not move it. They don’t seem to have noticed that Ozu cut from what one camera shot to what another one did often.

In “Red Balloon,” the camera is still often stationary, but on something (car, bus, train) that is moving, so things still pass through the frame. And a considerable amount of the movie is shot from the same location in the crowded and messy apartment of Suzanne, the actress played by Binoche: at eye level of those sitting at the dining table. (Since they sit on chairs, this is higher than Ozu’s shots of Japanese kneeling at their dining table.)

I’m not sure the balloon is watching the mundane activities around the dining table, but it does seem to watch Simon, who rarely watches back and makes no attempt to capture the string after the opening scene of trying to coax it down above an entrance to the Metro. We, the viewers, also seem to be observing life in the late afternoon in Suzanne’s apartment (usually, before she gets home).

I’ll get to what happens (an unimportant concern, I’m pretty sure for Hou), but I want to note my admiration for one particularly brilliant shot in which the Suzanne’s Chinese au pair, who is also a film student in Paris, Song (Song Fang), is filming a café. I was wondering what had happened to her charge, Simon (Simon Iteanu), Suzanne’s son. Without a cut (but with a change of focus), he appears through the window inside playing pinball. Not as elaborate as the very extended final tracking shot in Antonioni’s “The Passenger” or the opening one in Mikhail Kalatozov's “Soy Cuba,” but impressive.

Antonioni loved mirror shots and window reflection shots. The shot into Simon playing pinball is only one of many shots through windows, often with reflections of the outside. These are not easy to due, and can be (indeed, are) overdone (as ones through car windshields are un “Summer Hours”). 

The architecture shots without people are another Antonioni feature (most famously the last reel of  “L’eclisse”). Hou (aided by Lee) is no slouch at artiness or abstraction, though not particularly focused on alienation in the Antonioni mode. That is, more a neutral observer—the balloon’s “eye” view.

Action? Does moving a piano up a flight of stairs count? (This costs 300 euros, btw.) If not, the only action is vehicles on their path and the balloon seemingly following some whimsical route.

Is what occurs supposed to mean something, too? This is a question often asked of Antonioni films and that I’ve been asking of recent Hou and Tsai movies (I so regret the early death of Edward Yang, my favorite Taiwanese director [Yi Yi]!). It is possible that Hou intended to contrast the harried, somewhat self-centered Frenchwoman (Suzanne) with the placid Chinese caregiver Song, though Suzanne takes time and pays attention to her son.

Simon’s father has been away in Montreal for two years, which distresses Suzanne trying to work at her art, run a household, and raise their son. To add insult to injury, the man’s friend Marc (Hippolyte Girardot), whom he installed in a downstairs apartment before he left and who ceased to pay rent, and who pops in to use her stove when preparing meals that require more burners than the apartment has. (Suzanne inherited the two flats, and not getting money from her husband, needs rent from the one in which Marc is squatting.)

There are scenes of Simon moving about, mostly with Suzanne. At no point does Simon have control of the red balloon, though it appears often, including outside the Musée d’Orsay while his class is sitting in front of the Les Nablis (post-Impressionist) painter, art critic, novelist, playwright, and woodblock-maker Félix Vallotton’s 1899 painting “The Balloon,” which shows a red balloon on the ground near a faceless child of indeterminate sex, a clump of trees and an adult pair looking at the child (or the balloon. Not one of the most famous pieces in the d’Orsay, but the different interpretations that the teacher elicits from Simon’s classmates seems a lesson in art being open to more than one interpretation — though not just any interpretation, constrained by some facticity (that male and female children were both dressed the same way in 1899, for instance, something the teacher tells her class, though I am not convinces that the figure most in the foreground is a child).  A rather dark image of the paining in which the balloon does not much stand out on the right can be seen at www.artsheaven.com/felix-vallotton-le-ballon.html. The shadows look more menacing than they did in the movie images of the painting That I imagine they are moving toward the child who is sunlit no doubt says something about me. I don’t have an explanation for why the seeming adult figures are lit in a pool of darkness. Perhaps they are on a hill or mound at the same height as the painter/point of view.*

IMHO,  “Flight of the Red Balloon” is a better Paris travelogue than “Red Balloon” was, though the original has taken on greater interest documenting shops, etc. of Paris in the mid-1950s.

Simon Iteanu is charming, but lacks the focus of the boy with the red balloon in “Red Balloon.” Binoche’s out-of-control dyed hair might be considered a character, too.  I hope she has reverted to being a brunette!) Suzanne is trying to do too many things at once, and doesn’t have time to look in a mirror or attempt to bring her hair under control. Though absorbed in her own dramas (not just those she plays giving varied voices to a Chinese puppet show in French, but her conflict with her non-paying tenant and long-absent husband), she is not vain.

Binoche is a very accomplished actress, who clearly can craft an interesting character without any scriptwriter’s lines. In one scene in which she is looking at old 8mm soundless movies of her grandfather and her daughter, she extemporaneously invents dialogue. I didn’t immediately realize she was voicing both the grandfather and the young daughter. On being questioned by Simon (who has never seen a movie without sound before), she tells him she is making it up, not remembering. She also has two virtuoso cell phone scenes, one with her husband in Montreal, one with her daughter in Brussels (I have no idea why Louise is there, and there are strong doubts about whether either is going to come back to live with Suzanne again).

I don’t recall Binoche being called upon to do frantic before, but she seems like a harried working mother. Her small joys and petty irritations seem real to me. Even with other sympathetic characters (including a blind piano tuner) and Paris sites, this may not be enough to sustain some viewers through 113 minutes, but compared to” Flowers of Shanghai” (1998) or “Millennium Mambo” (2001) I considered the movie a joy.

It reminded me that early on, Hou worked well with children in such movies as “The Boys from Fengkuei” (1983) and  “A Summer at Grandpa's” (1984), “A Time to Live and a Time to Die” (1985)

There are no bonus features (I don’t consider trailers for other movies that cannot be chosen from the menu but play automatically when the DVD is loaded a “bonus.”) The colors are bright (much brighter than the remastered “Red Balloon,” or perhaps that is because it was made before André Malraux commanded the cleaning of Paris exteriors.)

* A German critic in 1910 wrote that the Swiss-born (Lausanne) Vallotton "paints like a policeman, like someone whose job it is to catch forms and colors.... The colors lack all joyfulness." I’d apply this to much of the cinema of Hou and Tsai, at least to their seeming surveillance of places in which not much (if anything!) happens.

I found the DVD on the shelf of the San Francisco Public Library, so this review is a contribution to Laurashrti’s library writeoff.

Recommended: Yes