Review of Flight of the Red Balloon (2007) by Becky C — 08 Feb 2009

This caught me by surprise. Not that I didn't expect to love it - even on paper, all of the elements were in place for that - but of course, I had just assumed it would retain the original concept, somehow expanding it to a feature length story. I expected a remake, of sorts, not an ode to the beautiful, mysterious space that the original film seems to hold in the minds of those of us who were fortunate enough to see it as children, and the ongoing desire of filmmakers (Hou specifically, of course) not just to re-create on screen their own moviegoing experiences, but somehow to find them in their real lives, to live inside a movie, as it were.

The first time we travel to a city where a favorite movie took place we always secretly hope, don't we, that the experiences, or at least the feelings, of that film will unfold for us while we're there. When Song Fang first made a specific reference to the Lamorisse film, in her walk & talk with Simon, then noticed shortly thereafter the painted balloon on the side of the building and turned her video camera on it, I gasped audibly and was pretty much a big baby for the next two hours. In a way that's very rare for me in a film, I felt like I knew its maker - personally, deeply, specifically - via the illusion that the maker knew me in those ways, so perfectly attuned to my responses were each of the gestures he made: the constant presence of the balloon during Song's more mundane, interior hours, via red objects and splashes of light; the well-represented spectrum of cinematic devices from PlayStation, back via Super-8, all the way to the implied zoetrope of carousel horses casting shadows on the ground; the school field trip to the Musee D'Orsay where the children are urged to view and analyze the Vallotton painting.

Between this film and the Wachowskis' Speed Racer, the greatest pleasures for me in last year's movies were from filmmakers who sought to re-express purely cinematic experiences from childhood, expanding not so much on the original material as on the memory of the experiences themselves. Flight of the Red Balloon is now, easily, my favorite film of 2008, and I can't remotely imagine what could beat it.