Hou Hsiao Hsien's Voyage of the Red Balloon

We screened this film as a family last night and I have to say that I was very moved by the delicacy of Hou's vision. I think it was released briefly in the US with little attention. The Voyage of the Red Balloon is a tribute to the 1956 French short named "The Red Balloon," and it touches on the formless, half-forgotten poignancy of childhood emotions that Hou and Truffaut are masters at representing. The film is about a harried single mother, played by Juliette Binoche. She is also an inspired director of a small puppet theater in Paris, teaches in a puppetry program and is trying to manage an ancient and cramped apartment building she inherited from her mother. Binoche is fearless about representing this woman in her worst light, including bad hair color with dark roots. She is always harried, overworked, and sometimes abrasive. She hires a new babysitter, a Taiwanese film student named Song to take care of her Simon. Simon and Song buy after school snacks, play pinball and Simon shares something of the story of the fractured family in which he has grown up. Binoche's distraction borders on neglect, but she also able to evoke the depth of her love for her son and a passion for her work that brook no sentimental or simple reconciliation. People say the word tenderness too easily these days, but this film is captures a stillness and tenderness simply in its static, long shots of family life in cramped quarters. Song's quiet, but compassionate presence, her calm detachment, her relationship to the family, to filmmaking and to the 1956 Red Balloon ground t the vision of this film.

If you expect a climax, or emotional release that has been niche-marketed and audience tested to death, you will be disappointed. Hou made a beautiful film, half drama, half documentary called The Puppetmaster about one of China's master puppeteer's life and career. This film is based in part on interviews with Li Tienlu the eponymous Puppetmaster and dramatizes his story. You can't help but think of puppetry in relationship to film and to think of the folkloric entertainment as some kind of ancestor to today's distraction. There is that moment in Truffaut's 400 Blows when Antoine and friend, playing truant, hide out in the puppet theater in the Jardin du Luxembourg.

In fact, if you read the on line reviews of Hou's work, complaints about long shots that never end, boredom and disappointment abound. But his work is about the long arc of small emotional events. He pays tribute to Paris -- a city that has inspired many filmmakers and is an especially important protagonist in the cinema of the French New Wave. Hou and Tsai Ming Liang along with the late Edward Yang made Taipei into a cinematically auratic city -- and the Taiwanese filmmakers have returned to Paris in order to pay tribute to it...Perhaps this is what people call transnational cinema, and it certainly is a sign that funding schemes know no national borders and that national cinemas are transnational cinemas. Tsai has been commissioned to make a film in the Louvre with Jeanne Moreau....