Taiwanese filmmaker Hou Hsiao-hsien evokes Albert Lamorisse’s fey little half-hour fantasy of 1956, not merely in the last three words of the title, but in very intermittent and unintegrated appearances of an actual red balloon, the size and strength of a beach ball, every bit as autonomous as Lamorisse’s, albeit less active and mischievous, more of a voyeur, a watcher, a guardian angel, a ghostly spirit. A Chinese film student in Paris, employed part-time as a nanny to a boy about the same age as the hero of The Red Balloon, overtly references the Lamorisse film by name, and currently happens to be making her own film about balloons. (She herself never sees the autonomous balloon; only the boy does.) Not even this, however, elevates the motif much above irrelevance. The boy’s mother has her hands full of more down-to-earth matters: an absent husband in Montreal, a daughter (by a previous husband) overdue for a visit from Brussels, a troublesome downstairs tenant, a new production at the puppet theater where she voices the characters, in addition to her son’s new nanny. The ingredient of fantasy is something new for Hou, and just as well it’s no more than a pinch or two. The Parisian setting is of course something new too, but it doesn’t disturb the Eastern eye or the Eastern pace. Hou will remain Hou, wherever he may go. (He also went somewhere new in Café Lumière. Tokyo. An hommage to Ozu in a greater degree than this one is to Lamorisse.) Pacing, it scarcely bears saying, is crucial to him, though not what’s usually meant by that: not fast, breathless, heart-pounding, but instead commandingly and compellingly slow, so that you become aware of time ticking by, conscious of the immediate moment, undistracted by where you’re headed. The pace of contemplation. And his eye rarely, if ever, fails him. Although the color here might be a shade jaundiced, the camera is forever wandering casually, as if by chance, into the most exquisite compositions, patched together on a vertical plane out of shop windows, doors, street signs, posters, polygons of peeled plaster, etc., or receding in space down the crevasse of a pedestrian passageway. And it can hardly go wrong amid the clutter of the mother’s cramped and lived-in apartment, the mounted masks, the bookshelves, the stacks of CDs and videos, the vases, the wall calendar, the kitchen doorframe. Anywhere the camera turns in this place, it will find a Bonnard-like bonanza. There’s endless ingenuity in these discoveries, and there’s even a certain type of suspense in the anticipation of the next eye-grabber. Juliette Binoche, Simon Iteanu, Song Fang. (2007) — Duncan Shepherd
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