Melancholy clings to Simon, Suzanne and Song as it does to many of Hou’s characters. Much like the red balloon, which bops into periodic view and hovers outside the apartment window like a prowler (or an angel), mother and child appear especially adrift. They’re both in the world and yet somehow apart, as if lost in a mutual dream.
This otherworldly sense is amplified by two flashbacks — one motivated by Simon, the other by Suzanne — involving the family’s other child, Louise (Louise Margolin), a teenager who lives in Brussels, where she cares for her maternal grandfather, a puppeteer like Suzanne. Seen only in flashback and in images from childhood, Louise is the resident ghost, a reminder of the time when the family was together.
That may sound heavy, yet there’s a lightness of touch here that keeps the worst at bay. Hou’s films can be crushingly sad; as with Bresson and Ozu, his restraint only deepens the emotional power of his work. But whether because of that red balloon — which alternately invokes the spirit of liberty and its elusiveness — or because he was practicing his art in one of the world’s most beautiful cities, Hou has made a film that is, to borrow a line from one of his characters, “a bit happy and a bit sad.” These words are spoken by a student who, with Simon and a cluster of others, is in the Musee d’Orsay with a teacher discussing Felix Vallotton’s 1899 painting of a child chasing a red ball, Le Ballon.
Vallotton was associated with a group of Post-Impressionist artists, including Maurice Denis, who took their inspiration from Gauguin and called themselves the Nabis. The Nabis created vividly colored, abstracted images of everyday life that I think Hou must find appealing.
Embracing his status as a prophet of the modern, Denis wrote: “Remember that a painting — before being a war horse, a nude woman or some anecdote or other — is essentially a flat surface covered with colors arranged in a certain order.” This seems worth mentioning because while it’s easy enough to speak of Hou’s themes — the dissolution of the family, among others — this film is also a flat surface of a different type covered with colors arranged in a certain order. (Plus light!)
In the end what elevates Hou’s films to the sublime — and this one comes close at times — are not the stories but their telling. In Flight of the Red Balloon Hou plays with light and space on the small canvas that is Simon and Suzanne’s apartment, moving the camera around as gracefully as if it were a brush (or a balloon).
In one magnificent scene the camera floats from one character to the next for roughly eight minutes without a single cut, tracing invisible lines between Simon, Suzanne, Song, an intrusive neighbor and a piano tuner who is working on the family’s old upright. Out of this chaos — Simon playing, Suzanne yelling, the piano tuner tuning, and Song simply moving among them — Hou creates the world.
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