The Flight of the Red Balloon.

"Like his 2004 film Café Lumière, Hou Hsiao-hsien's sublime new movie The Flight of the Red Balloon finds the director in a foreign country paying homage to another filmmaker," writes Chris Wisniewski at indieWIRE. "With Lumiere, Yasujiro Ozu was Hou's reference point and Tokyo his canvas; here, Hou reimagines Albert Lamorisse's classic 1956 short The Red Balloon as a Parisian family melodrama."

"A remarkably rich, rewarding, and restful experience, Hou's latest is a film like no other - in the simplicity of its lines, colors, and framing, and in the complexity of how those elements compound and contextualize its emotional subject matter, The Flight of the Red Balloon can, in my mind, be compared to the works of Matisse," writes Michael Koresky in Reverse Shot. "Despite this elevation, the film, miraculously, doesn't feel like an artist's grand summation, but rather just another in a long line of purely wrought canvases; it never calls attention to its own technique or turns its endless flow of lovely, complicated compositions into recognizable set pieces, and instead allows its three principal characters to navigate its spaces with ease."

Updated through 4/5.

Mark Asch in the L Magazine: "As an emotional experience, Flight is beyond therapeutic: Hou's drifting long takes accommodate octaves of melancholic grace notes, as in a late single-shot scene balancing the breaking and receding of multiple domestic crises, while a blind piano tuner works just offscreen. A sense of harmony is the not-so-secret to Hou's resonant ambience, and, maybe, how he makes someplace like home out of transcontinental flux."

"Lamorisse's balloon now floats above Simon (Simon Iteanu), a 7-year-old Paris boy whose single mother, Suzanne (Juliette Binoche), can barely keep her life together, and whose new nanny, Song (Song Fang), is a quiet, attentive film student who thinks about making her own version of The Red Balloon," writes David Edelstein in New York. "That balloon stands in for Hou and Song; at times it has the impishness of a Miyazaki god."

Dennis Lim has a profile in the New York Times: "Mr Hou, who turns 61 next month, has worked on large and small canvases, moving from rural autobiography (1985's Time to Live and a Time to Die) to national history (1989's City of Sadness), period chamber drama (1998's Flowers of Shanghai) to youth-culture document (2001's Millennium Mambo). He combines most of those modes in Three Times (2005), a self-consciously retrospective triptych. What connects his films above all is the neorealist conviction, more formal than political, that stories should emerge from the flux of daily life."

Martin Tsai talks with Hou for the New York Sun.

Twitch's Todd Brown has the latest on Hou's next project, his first wuxia film. Shu Qi and Chang Chen have signed on; Tadanobu Asano and Takeshi Kaneshiro are said to have been... approached.

Earlier: Reviews from Cannes and the NYFF.

Updates: "Part of Hou's genius is imbuing this material with emotion that is genuine and tender but never sentimental," writes Premiere's Glenn Kenny. "This is a slice of life that implies so much more than what's on its surface, something that today's conventional narrative films are increasingly hard-pressed to even attempt."

"Already, I have two strong candidates for my favorite film of 2008 (the other being Syndromes and a Century)," writes Jeffrey Overstreet. "Hou's mastery of light, reflection, and composition have me suspecting that he may surpass Kieslowski and Wong Kar Wai as my favorite image-maker for the screen."

Updates, 4/2: "Since late January, New York audiences have been harvesting the riches of the 2007 Cannes Film Festival - Cristian Mungiu's 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, Gus Van Sant's Paranoid Park, Alexander Sokurov's Alexandra, New Directors highlights La France and Jellyfish, Asia Argento's performance in Boarding Gate," writes J Hoberman in the Voice. "But Flight of the Red Balloon is in a class by itself. In its unexpected rhythms and visual surprises, its structural innovations and experimental perfs, its creative misunderstandings and its outré syntheses, this is a movie of genius."

"In honor of the film's elliptical episodes," Daniel Kasman presents "a descriptive analysis or review of Flight of the Red Balloon in similar fragments" in the Auteurs' Notebook.

"[S]low, unassuming, and strangely mesmerizing," writes Marcy Dermansky.

Update, 4/3: "Flight never penetrates child and pop consciousness; luckily Hou has Binoche to ballast his vague meanderings," writes Armond White in the New York Press. "Like Terry Gilliam's 12 Monkeys (a two-hour adaptation of Chris Marker's 28-minute La Jetée), Hou's Lamorisse remake lasts longer than the original - but says less."

Updates, 4/5: "Mr Hou's films can be crushingly sad; as with Bresson and Ozu, his restraint only deepens the emotional power of his work," writes Manohla Dargis in the New York Times. "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, Mr Hou has made a film that is, to borrow a line from one of his characters, 'a bit happy and a bit sad.'... In the end what elevates Mr 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 Mr 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)."

"[O]verselling the subtlety of Hou's movies - his last was the marvelous triptych of love stories Three Times - can make them seem like abstraction rather than the beautifully concrete traceries that they so often are, and there's nothing elusive or difficult about his latest, the quietly astonishing Flight of the Red Balloon," writes Salon's Stephanie Zacharek. "This is a flight of fancy grounded in real life."

"[T]he mere fact that a Hou Hsiao-hsien work features something that one would consider 'whimsical' is news enough," writes Kenji Fujishima at the House Next Door. "Here, arguably for the first time ever, he's trying to blend the fantastical with the real and, miraculously, one never intrudes upon the other except in the most sublime ways.... Yet departure or not, Flight of the Red Balloon always feels like a Hou Hsiao-hsien work, and not just because of his typically lengthy master shots and careful framing. His usual concerns with history, identity, art and reality are all present in the film, but, like the titular balloon, they all hover over it without unduly imposing themselves."

"If not as demanding as Mr Hou's past history-weighted works, Flight rewards multiple viewings, like revisiting a painting," writes Nicolas Rapold in the New York Sun. "The movie, in fact, ends with a grade-school student at a museum responding to Félix Vallotton's Le Ballon, which depicts a child running (gaily? frantically?) after a ball. It's an appropriate end to a film that was commissioned by the Musée d'Orsay; Mr Hou's wonderful film is indeed a living, breathing work of art and life."

"Flight of the Red Balloon all but dares the spectator to play 'find the symbol,'" writes Steve Erickson in Gay City News. "It's an uncommonly elusive film, although more accessible than most of the Taiwanese director's work. Even after seeing it twice, I feel like I've only scratched the surface."

"The delicate-featured Binoche has made her image and her career playing waifs, but she clearly saw this single-mother role as her chance to play, for lack of a better word, a broad, and she runs with it," writes Phil Nugent at ScreenGrab. "Binoche looks as if she's having more fun than she's ever had in a movie before when she's rampaging around the apartment warring with the neighbors or providing funny voices backstage at the puppet shows."

"The film disappoints more in context with his career than as a standalone piece; once a director who brought history to scrupulous life in the modern classics The Puppetmaster and Flowers of Shanghai, Hou has lately contented himself with pretty little baubles that, Three Times excepted, are lacking in ambition," writes Scott Tobias at the AV Club.

At Cinematical, Jeffrey M Anderson recalls that in a 1999 Village Voice poll, Hou was declared the "Director of the Decade."

Posted by dwhudson at March 31, 2008 4:05 AM