Rotterdam, the Netherlands
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Filmography: Hou Hsiao-hsien
Trailer: 'Flight of the Red Balloon'
Michiko Hada in Hou Hsiao-hsien’s “Flowers of Shanghai.”
WHEN the Taiwanese filmmaker Hou Hsiao-hsien was commissioned to make a movie in Paris, his first outside Asia, he chose as his starting point Albert Lamorisse’s beloved 1956 short film, “The Red Balloon.” As it happens Mr. Hou, who knew Paris only from a few brief visits, discovered Lamorisse’s very French children’s classic through a fellow outsider. He read about it in “From Paris to the Moon,” a ruminative collection of dispatches by the New Yorker writer Adam Gopnik, about expatriate family life in the French capital.
In keeping with Mr. Gopnik’s depiction, the not-quite-touristy Paris of Mr. Hou’s film, “Flight of the Red Balloon” (opening Friday), is suffused with the romance and the mystery of the everyday. The movie unfolds largely in the cafes, parks and cramped apartments of the city. Like his other films, with its patiently observed and palpably lived-in locations, it has an acute, almost tactile sense of place.
Before fleshing out the story Mr. Hou decided on the actors and determined the film’s geography, taking in the layout and the street-level ambience of the neighborhoods where he would be shooting. “There’s a kind of abstract thinking in the way I work, but I need to start with something concrete, a place or a person,” he said, speaking through a translator at the Rotterdam International Film Festival in January.
Part childhood fable, part urban reverie, “Flight of the Red Balloon” does not adapt “The Red Balloon” so much as borrow its iconography: a boy, a balloon, a cityscape. The boy is 7-year-old Simon (Simon Iteanu). His manic single mother, Suzanne (Juliette Binoche), rehearses long hours at her puppet theater, so he’s often left with his new nanny, Song (Song Fang), a film student from Beijing (who’s making a video short inspired by “The Red Balloon”). The balloon here is less central than in the Lamorisse original, in which it was the young hero’s almost lifelike sidekick. Here it floats enigmatically through the frame, a seemingly watchful presence and a magical corollary to the film’s drifting rhythms and casual buoyancy.
“Flight of the Red Balloon” is the first of a series financed by the Musée d’Orsay, and at least one scene had to be shot at the museum. Mr. Hou approached this task somewhat offhandedly. “I asked the museum if they had any Impressionist paintings with red objects, preferably balloons,” he said. Félix Vallotton’s painting “Le Ballon,” which shows a child chasing after a red ball in a park, the patch of earth divided between sunlight and shadow, fit the bill perfectly. The painting is the centerpiece of a culminating scene: a group of schoolchildren crowd around it, and one of them offers an appraisal — “a bit happy and a bit sad” — that could apply to Mr. Hou’s film as well.
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.
Small moments of drama erupt throughout “Flight of the Red Balloon,” but the plot matters less than the intangibles: the often unspoken moods and emotions of the characters or the subtly changing quality of light in the spaces they inhabit. Even more than usual, Mr. Hou insisted on spontaneity. There were no rehearsals and most scenes were improvised. “If the dialogue’s all written out, it sounds too dramatic,” he said. “And you could not expect me to write realistic French dialogue.”
Many details were drawn from the lives of the film’s participants. Suzanne’s apartment is the home of one of Mr. Hou’s producers (whose actual experience with a problem tenant is replicated in one of the fleeting subplots). Ms. Binoche’s father once worked as a puppeteer (and Mr. Hou himself explored the subject in 1993’s majestic “Puppetmaster”). Ms. Song was studying at the Beijing Film Academy when Mr. Hou met her a few years ago. Simon is the son of Mr. Hou’s French publicist and attends the school that is seen in the film.
As an outsider, Mr. Hou said, it made sense to mine the day-to-day routines of his collaborators. “I wanted to get a realistic feel for the place and how these people live,” he said. “You have to ask yourself: What would these characters do? Where do they work and shop and play? What trains do they take?” He had worked in a similar fashion for the only other film he has made abroad, “Café Lumiere” (2003), set in Tokyo, a homage to the Japanese master Yasujiro Ozu.
Mr. Hou created detailed back stories for Ms. Binoche and the other actors but also granted them a certain agency. “There was a lot of freedom,” he said. “Which of course can be quite difficult. Juliette was used to getting a grasp of her character by learning her lines, so it took her a while to get used to taking control.”
As a result Ms. Binoche gives one of the boldest performances of her career, a striking departure from the morose beauties she has typically played. The frazzled Suzanne, a mess of flyaway bottle-blond hair and jangling bracelets, is a wholly believable creation, an easily distracted but genuinely loving parent. In an interview at the Toronto International Film Festival this fall, Ms. Binoche said the character clicked into place when she flashed on Gena Rowlands’s larger-than-life performance in “A Woman Under the Influence” (1974).