Flight of the Red Balloon 

Imagination, patience and an appreciation of the unfamiliar will come in handy for American audiences fortunate enough to find themselves confronted with the latest creation from Taiwan-based filmmaker Hou Hsiao-Hsien. Imagine, first of all, a world in which motion pictures are commissioned by great museums rather than green-lighted by studio bean counters. It sounds like something that could happen only on another planet or in a work of utopian fantasy, but this is, in fact, how Flight of the Red Balloon came to be made.

Much of the world over, Hou is considered a modern master with a style distinguished by poetic realism. If you happen upon Caf Lumire, Flowers of Shanghai, Millennium Mambo or The Puppetmaster in the Foreign Language section of your local video store, do yourself a favor: Don’t leave without them. On the basis of Hou’s reputation, the Muse d’Orsay contacted the director and asked him to produce a movie based on Albert Lamorisse’s classic 1956 children’s short “The Red Balloon,” a work he had never seen.

The result is a singular cinematic experience. As in Lamorisse’s film, we’re introduced to a young French boy (here, 7-year-old Simon Iteanu) who appears to lack friends his own age. He spots a bright crimson dot bobbing above the Paris streets and pleads for it to come to him. The new picture departs from the old one when Simon gives up and goes home unlike the tot in the original, who wandered the city with his spherical playmate.

Hou recasts the latex orb, in fact. Rather than being a mystical companion, it plays the role of free-floating, sentient metaphor. In his film, the balloon follows the boy home and appears to regard his daily life from various vantage points out of his line of sight. Is it a guardian angel? Does it stand for the joy just beyond reach? It could be God for all we know, and the enigma only adds to the movie’s magical quality.

True, there’s nothing fantastic or fairy-tale-like about this boy’s life. His best friend is his Playstation. He spends most of his time in the care of his nanny, a young film student named Song Fang played by a young filmmaker who studied under Hou and is named Song Fang. One of the director’s several trippy touches: Fang herself is working on a digital-video remake of “The Red Balloon” throughout the movie.

Simon’s mother, Suzanne, is played by Juliette Binoche. The actress gives a let-it-rip performance as a scattered bohemian whose life is as big a mess as her cramped, cluttered apartment. The director of a puppet theater, she juggles rehearsals for a new show based on a story from the Yuan Dynasty with various other endeavors: raising a son with little help from her husband (who’s in Montral); ostensibly working on a novel; trying to persuade her older daughter to return from a prolonged visit with grandparents in Belgium; and doing the legal maneuvering required to evict a deadbeat tenant so her daughter will have a place to stay. She smokes too much and is always stepping over empty wine bottles, but her devotion to her son is total.

It’s a chaotic, vastly credible piece of acting, all the more remarkable for the fact that Hou made the entire movie without a script, or rather with a script that didn’t include a word of dialogue. Following discussions with the director, the actors were called on to create their own lines, scene by scene. Now there’s a guy who knows how to delegate.

What you see on screen is every bit as extraordinary as how it got there. The story is minimal and the pacing unhurried, but, even at just under two hours, the film has not a frame that doesn’t contain something fascinating. Images of lyrical beauty alternate with slices of big-city hustle-bustle, and throughout, the mysterious sphere pops up in a hundred unexpected visual echoes a painting on the side of a building, the red pouch of a backpack, a stop light, a red Jetta shot from just the right angle, orbs of refracted light.

The movie closes with a scene shot at the Muse d’Orsay. As Simon and his classmates stand before the Felix Vallotton painting “The Balloon” (yes, it’s red), their teacher asks whether they see it as a happy painting or a sad painting. In Vallotton’s image, a child pursues the elusive object, eternally just beyond its grasp. “It’s both,” one of the kids answers, and that’s true of Flight of the Red Balloon, too. Life’s miracles and its messiness, its delights and its disappointments are evoked with quiet virtuosity in this homage, which is itself a cause for celebration.