We haven’t heard from Albert Lanier in Hawaii for a while, but the HIFF is gearing up, and so he’s checking in with the first of his reviews for this year:
HAWAII INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL 2007
BALLOON ROUGE: BETTER RED THAN DEAD
by Albert Lanier
One of the problems with film and cinema in general is that the medium has become largely locked to the minor, passing and largely trivial concerns of entertainment.
American film (much like television) in particular has bowed to the demands of executives and demographers who insist that having a requisite amount of plot points arrayed in the right linear pattern of progression will attract witless and tactless 12 and 13 year olds and perhaps their moronic parents to cease and desist from their lame-ass, brain dead reality show about a 30 year old tennis star who has to decide whether choose a 24 year old hardbody or a 44 year old hardbody to date while eating the heads of off rattlesnakes for the chance to win a million dollars. Oh and all the while living somewhere in mainland China with 30 strangers who keep saying "You're Fired" to each other in jest.
Apparently, the tribe has spoken.
Well, as Woody Allen might say, I would never belong to any tribe that would have me for a member.
Still, I do belong to a tribe of sorts: a tribe of online film critics. In my tribal capacity, it is my duty to report to you about the FLIGHT OF THE RED BALLOON (or LE VOYAGE DU BALLON ROUGE), the opening night film of the 27th annual Hawaii International Film Festival which was screened on Thursday, October 18 at 8:20 p.m.
FLIGHT OF THE RED BALLOON was directed and co-written by the excellent Taiwanese director Hou Hsiao-Hsien and serves as his first french language film. FLIGHT was screened at this year's Cannes Film Festival.
Maybe they liked FLIGHT in France but in Honolulu where Hou's film was shown at the ornate 1400 seat Hawaii Theater, it was clear the audience thought this film was boring and uninteresting.
I guess I could understand. FLIGHT-like a number of Hou's films-SEEMS to be about nothing important or earth shattering.
After all, this film centers on a single mother named Suzanne (played by the wonderful Juliette Binoche) and her young Simon and Simon's Chinese nanny Song Fang.
Song Fang was a film student in Beijing and is porbably still studying in France. She interested in doing a film about a boy with a red balloon which is an homage to a 1957 film directed by filmmaker Albert Lammorise.
Song Fang films Simon at times when the two are out of doors, either playing pin ball or talking about his "pretend sister" Louise who is studying in Belgium.
Suzanne is trying to action against tenants in her building who haven't paid rent for months and of course, there is a red balloon that wafts at times above apartment buildings, paris metro staircase entrances, train tracks.
I could write more just fill up space here but there is no real plot in FLIGHT, no rising action (other than that initiated by the balloon), no denouement worth speaking of.
Nobody gets killed or maimed and no animals were harmed during the making of this film.
No wonder the Hawaii audience didn't like this film. FLIGHT is not a work of entertainment but a film that is content to watch, observe and look within the lives of its characters.
And that is why it works for me. I don't require all films to move at breakneck speed or always advance the plot or show us all the facets of all the characters. Sometimes, I just like to watch.
Hou is a director who uses his camera almost like a human eye, it darts back and forth and Hou prefers setting shots with a point of view that is distinctive.
