Le voyage du ballon rouge / Flight of the Red Balloon

October 3rd, 2009

Puppet theater voice actress Suzanne (Juliette Binoche) lives with her young son Simon (Simon Iteanu) in a tiny Parisian apartment. With her hectic schedule, she has little time to care for the boy and leaves most of her mothering duties to baby sitter Song (Fang Song). As Suzanne becomes embroiled in a court case involving her downstairs tenant, Song and Simon become intrigued by a red balloon that starts following them around the city.

Two things: French women are wonderful. This movie is not what I expected. The Flight of the Red Balloon is inspired and based on an older film called The Red Balloon. The Red Balloon is a short film made in the fifties about a young boy who is followed and follows a red balloon all over Paris. I had thought this movie would have involved more dialogue and plot, but actually it’s stylistically a lot like Italian neo-realism. The characters exist at a distance, even though they have their own struggles and issues. Juliette Binoche is a gorgeous and graceful woman who is struggling with her own set of issues and trying to take care of her son, Simon. To help her at this time, she hires an Asian film student named Song to take care of her son. And while this might sound like a set up for a movie with engaging, dramatic scenes, the viewer is actually more like an observer at a coffee shop or on a bus. You can see the emotions, and you feel for them, but these interactions are not what drives the movie. In some ways, the camera is a lot like the floating red balloon that appears sporadically through the movie. It floats at a distance, often just out of reach of the main characters, but it’s never owned. Unlike the original film, the balloon never really becomes a character in the movie. I think this is one factor that kept me from really loving the movie, though. While I really enjoyed the cinematography and music, I think this film might have worked just as well, if not better, if it just focused on the relationship dynamics. The Red Balloon that played such a pivotal role in the 1950s movie was relegated to the background. There were times it seemed to give young Simon solace, friendship, but it too always seemed quite out of reach. Perhaps I need more time to process the movie, but those are my thoughts now.