The flight of the red balloon (2007)

There’s a surge of interest in “contemplative cinema”. I am not at all comfortable with the concept. I become all the more suspicious when I watch Flight of the red balloon, a pretty, yet timid, piece of slice-of-life. I’ve heard about Hou Hsiao-hsien, but this is the first time I see one of his movies. What didn’t work for me in the movie was its too overt use of cinematography, symbolism and “calming” music. To me, the film lacks the edginess it would need to keep it from becoming tepid. I can’t say I was bored by it, but some scenes annoyed me, being too pretty, lacking substance and a sense of cinematic urgency. Sure, I see where his style is coming from. I recognize the romantic sense of everyday life as present in Wong Kar-Wai’s oeuvre, and there are bits of pieces of Kieslowski, even Bresson, here, too. The title refers to red balloons. The red balloon is all over the place. It’s present in a slew of scenes, it’s talked about, it’s shown in a film-in-film, it’s even included in the music. If there is one example of overloading an image, this is it. I didn’t like the god damn balloon in the very first scene in the movie. It didn’t get better. The film, however, features some decent scenes as well. A young boy, Simon, lives with his mother in a crammed apartment. The new babysitter, Song, has just arrived. In the best moments of the film, we see the mother, the son or Song moving around in the apartment, going about their everyday business, perhaps angrily arguing with a bothersome neighbor. The balloon-free, music-free scenes, which are not so loaded with Meaning, are, to me, the best ones. They have a quiet sense of life passing by, everyday conflicts, mundane conversations.  I have to add I was a bit worried that Juliette Binoche would destroy this movie. I was surprised to see she performed her repulsive role with a, in the context of the film, liberating amount of gusto. The visual expression of the film is certainly pleasing to the eye (saturated colors, mesmerizing urban perspectives, reflecting images & shapes, a pattern of color scales) but regardless of this I could not stop feeling that the director was somehow trying too hard to make a serene movie.