Chinese Tutor - "Balloon" has more bad gas than the Hindenberg

ENTERTAINMENT / Movies






"Balloon" has more bad gas than the Hindenberg

(Reuters)
Updated: 2007-05-25 14:06



CANNES - Albert Lamorisse's transcendent 1956 film "Le Ballon Rouge" is
more vital than this hodgepodge homage from Taipei filmmaker Hou Hsiao
Hsien.

Weighted with the dreary ballast of a heavy-themed family saga and
grounded by the conceit of letting the players ad-lib their dialogue,
"The Flight of the Red Balloon" drifts, poofs and ultimately flops.
Audiences may rightly discern that this "Balloon" is in both form and
content an egg.

Bad hair, rather than the pliant red balloon, is the central image of
this dolorous monotony. Hou shoots mostly from the side, so we're
constantly subjected to the side profiles of all the players: the
beatific kid, Simon (Simon Iteanu); the frazzled mother, Suzanne (
Juliette Binoche); the implacable Chinese nanny, Song (Song Fang); and
the melanges of mangy others. Such a sideways visual strategy does little
to draw us to the characters, and, most egregiously, we never come to
care about this modern-day family.

In this demi-ditty, mop-haired Simon is a quiet kid who endures stoically
the shrill hysterics of his theatrical mother. He tries to draw away into
his own world of old-style pinball games, but he's undeniably stunted by
his crummy family life and his mother's relentlessly flaky hysterics.
Rounding out this familial menagerie is Song, a stoic film student who
acts as the boy's nanny while the mother is preoccupied with her career
as a vocal artist for a puppet company.

Without delineating the details of this family portrait, suffice it to
say that Hou has further enervated the already drab proceedings with dull
padding: a piano lesson for beginner Simon, or several snatches of
Simon's simple pleasure, playing pinball. Other banalities abound, in
large part courtesy to the conceit of not writing dialogue in the script
and the choice of shooting in long or side shot. Unfortunately, Hou does
not merge these aesthetics by mitigating the bad dialogue by shooting it
long, out of earshot.

The imagery of the classic movie, where a spirited red balloon wafts
unpredictably over Paris, never even attempts to reach a metaphorical
height, nor does it even engage us compositionally. For the most part,
the heart of the classic is transmuted through the film-student lens of
the foreign film student, such is the minimalist scope of this piffle.

In her performance as the dark-rooted, bottle-blond, mother artiste,
Binoche soars. She delivers a wondrously conflicted gaggle of emotions
and movements. Archly irritating, she is nonetheless sympathetic in her
flailing. As such, the film might be retro-titled from "Red Balloon" to
"Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown." Indeed, since the balloon
does not appear all that often, a few snippets of the editor's tool might
align this movie mess, at least in theme, with another grander film with
at least a more similar theme.

As the beatific child, Iteanu sports a thick and tossed neo-Beatles look
and seems to have an intriguing face, when we're permitted to see it.
However, his performance, if he delivered one, is obscured by the obscure
framings and, most clearly, Hou's tenuous grasp on trying to figure out
what movie he was making, or in this case, what classic film he was
defiling.

Cast:

Suzanne: Juliette Binoche

Simon: Simon Iteanu

Song: Song Fang

Marc: Hippolyte Girardo

Louise: Louise Margolin

Director: Hou Hsiao Hsien; Screenwriters: Hou Hsiao Hsien, Francois
Margolin; Producers: Francois Margolin, Kristina Larsen; Directors of
photography: Yorick Lesauz, Mark Lee Ping Bing; Production designer: Paul
Fayard; Editors: Jean-Christophe Hym, Ching Sung Liao.












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