Quick take: The Flight of the Red Balloon

It would have been nice to see Albert Lamorisse's 1956 The Red Balloon again before seeing Hou Hsiao-Hsien's 2007 tribute, but it didn't work out. Things have changed in Paris, and the world, since the original. Yet despite being very modern in terms of dealing with divorce, globalization, video, cellphones, and so on, The Flight of the Red Balloon has a reassuringly grounded quality. It essentially revolves entirely around home and family life, and though there is trauma in this family, the story isn't built around disruption. There's no plot at all, in a conventional sense, and the action is very naturalistic, as if we'd just stumbled upon this family and the neighbors and visitors surrounding it. There are some impressively long takes in which happy, sad, and ambiguous action plays out among a handful of characters in a small space with no break in our experience. In that sense, it's like an Ozu film transplanted to Paris and the postmodern age, much as Cafe Lumiere revisited Ozu's Tokyo Story in the title city. Domestic (and some professional) life plays out at a sane, realistic pace, with looming dangers no greater than those in any average life. The action, like the home of Suzanne (wonderfully played by Juliette Binoche), her son Simon (Simon Iteanu), and his nanny Song (Fang Song), seems lived-in. The balloon itself has a relatively small role, though once again what's remarkable about it is that it seems to have a mind of its own. I think one of the points of this film is that each human, too -- even the director -- has a mind of his or her own and all of us live in our own worlds. But even without deep analysis, I found this initially sluggish film quite enjoyable as an experience.