Hou Hsiao-hsien, 2007
“Class? What are we seeing here?”
There is, amongst the ennui, an exceptionally and overwhelmingly affecting denouement to Hsiao-hsien’s predictably amazing film (finally screening here as part of the 2008 French Film Festival), an almost sweet and definitely melancholic rumination on time and loss and mediated remembrance.
Contrary to some opinions, Hsiao-hsien’s films are rarely wasteful. Images never exist for imagery’s sake, his “setting shots” are rarely just that, and notions of character are established through subtle yet evocatively revisited real-life/real-time actions; his works often a sequence of masterful master shots that almost imperceptibly move between moments, time bleeding into yet more time but always eternally and elusively passing. In this, his latest – as much an homage to Albert Lamorisse’s 1956 short Le Ballon Rouge as it is the very continuation of his primary concerns - he distributes both his narrative focus and his symbols of box-trapped-time equally amongst the three central characters: the young Simon, a Little Prince-esque observer of the so-described “complicated” adult world who is being followed by the titular balloon; his new nanny Song, a recent Asian émigré and filmmaker who documents her life via camera; and Simon’s mother Suzanne, proprietor of a marionette theatre. The various methodologies employed by the various mortals here represent the war against death, primarily the death of memory and the always fading tide of culture and community – Song’s personal digital memories as valid as the ancient narratives of Suzanne’s marionettes, and Simon’s absent father’s novel as valid as Simon’s video games (which sit neatly and pointedly amongst Suzanne’s books’ shelves).
Furthermore, Hsiao-hsien recasts the titular symbol as almost everything, at times youth and the naive happiness native to such, at others the sum of a life of lost images, it often seemingly merely a mirror (of which, here, there are many; the final fifteen minutes almost exclusively viewed through prismatic reflections) upon which one can project whichever personal and reflective notion one desires, and it is within this that the film’s finale drags one almost literally into the image: visiting Musée d’Orsay (who co-produced this work), Simon’s class are presented with Félix Vallotton’s 1899 painting Le Ballon, Lamorisse’s initial influence. As the class are questioned on the work’s meaning, the image’s focus shifts, revealing the entire class’ staring eyes reflected via the painting; this interactive perspective the very visual embodiment of an irresolute and poetic ambiguity, a question to viewers and an invitation to contribute a definition.
Opens May 29th - Como, Nova
