Flight of the Red Balloon

Rating:

* * * * *

Verdict:

A superb display of pure cinema from one of the masters of the medium.

Ineffable, mysterious and marvellous, the new film by Taiwanese maestro Hou touches the parts of you most movies don't reach.

Its style has been described elsewhere as poetic realism and that's apt, the storyline - revolving round a few characters in a sightly bohemian quarter of Paris - is quotidian in the extreme, but Hou's distinctive style - long takes with a stationary camera; delicious compositions, tantalisingly framed; and a mesmerisingly beautiful soundtrack - makes it into something that gets under your skin, the way a great line of poetry does.

It is inspired by Albert Lamorisse's 35-minute 1956 masterpiece

The Red Balloon

, in which a boy finds a loyal and mischievous helium-filled friend.

There's a talismanic red balloon in this film too, but Simon (Iteanu), never gets to hold it. In the opening scene, he tries in vain to charm down from its perch in a tree but it floats through the rest of the film - reflected in a window, glimpsed through a skylight, even depicted in a mural - a benevolent presence gazing on the busy lives below.

Struggling with that earthbound existence is Simon's harried mother Suzanne (Binoche), whose occupation as a puppeteer references Hou's 1992 masterpiece

The Puppetmaster

. Suzanne's life is a series of crises: her husband is absent, perhaps permanently, pursuing a literary dream in Montreal, and she is exasperated by a pair of deadbeat tenants (Girardot, Margolin) to whom she lets a floor of her apartment. But Song (Song), a Chinese film student whom she hires as a nanny, is a calming influence who gradually becomes the steady centre.

Hou's unhurried pace gives us the sense of having been invited to eavesdrop on his characters' lives.

The major advances in plot, such as they are, are confined to two telephone calls Suzanne takes (we hear only her side). Much of the rest of the time this is a film of which it may reasonably be said that nothing happens, yet scenes like the eight-minute, uncut take involving every character as well as a visiting piano tuner are thrillingly dense with action.

Binoche, anchoring a cast which improvises much of the dialogue, turns in the best work of her career and if the story is elliptical - the film is strictly not for those who like pulsing narrative drive - it affectingly blends a French command of emotional nuance with a distinctly Chinese aesthetic sensibility. It is also, not incidentally, a superb display of pure cinema: whether Hou and cinematographer Pin Bing Lee, are watching two piano movers at work or observing the shadows cast by merry-go-round horses, they are nothing less than painters in light and the film, which never tries to impress, is visually sublime. For all its unassuming modesty, this is a masterpiece.

(Note: if your childhood was so deprived that you never saw the Lamorisse film, the Academy has thoughtfully set up screenings. Best to see the 1956 film first, of course.)

Peter Calder

Cast:

Juliette Binoche, Simon Iteanu, Song Fang, Hippolyte Girardot, Louise Margolin

Director:

Hou Hsiao-hsien

Running time:

113 mins

Rating:

PG (low level offensive language)

Screening:

Academy