Taiwanese director Hou Hsiao Hsien directs Juliette Binoche in a carefully observed tale of 21st century distress and the possibly healing power of art in the French-language and Paris-set Le voyage du ballon rouge (The Flight of the Red Balloon). The opening film of the Cannes Film Festival's Un certain regard section is contemplative and at times poetic, but is strongest when caught up in the whirlwind of conflicting emotions of Binoche’s character, an overworked puppeteer and a mother of a seven year-old boy she mostly leaves in the care of a Chinese nanny. The combination of Binoche and Hou’s names should make for a very arthouse friendly run before finding a larger audience on DVD.

 

The film’s title derives from a red balloon that accompanies the characters from the start, as seven-year-old Simon (Simon Iteanu) tries to catch it as it floats above a metro entrance on the Place de la Bastille. The balloon motif is inspired by Albert Lamorisse's 1956 short film Le ballon rouge (The Red Balloon), which this film pays homage to. Hou’s first major European project is also the first film in a series that celebrates the Parisian Musée d’Orsay. That museum is shown in the film during an informal lecture for Simon’s class on a painting from Swiss artist Félix Vallotton that features a small boy and a red balloon and is described in terms of its dark-light contrasts and it effects on mood.

 

The Lamorisse short is explicitly referenced in the film by the nanny Song (Fang Song), who is a cinema student and who follows the little boy around with her video camera for her own film project involving a red balloon. Like Binoche’s Suzanne, Song is a busy woman who seems to find solace in her art, though Le voyage du ballon rouge does not see art as a one-size-fits-all Band-Aid but as something as complex as life in the big city in the 21st century.

 

The nanny’s first working day coincides with the moment the audience first meets the characters and is thus used as an easy entry point into the lives of the characters since Song is not at all familiar with either Suzanne or Simon and neither are they with her. Hou and co-writer and producer François Margolin illustrate how intricate our lives have become by offering three points-of-view that are close (but do never completely coincide with) the main characters: Suzanne, who is absorbed not only by her job but also her problems with the person who lets the apartment downstairs and her absent "man"; the newly arrived nanny who knows nothing about the family’s private life and how it is organised and the small boy, who is too little to understand everything but tries to make sense of it as well as he can. "Well, she’s my sister, but she’s not really my sister," he at one point explains to Song. "My parents got divorced, that’s all I know."

 

Though the film indulges perhaps a bit too much in shots of the titular balloon floating above the Parisian skyline, it remains a very well-chosen symbol of the simple pleasures of childhood, the continuous vitality and regenerative qualities of art (through its connection to the painting and the short film) and, through its colour, to China itself.

 

But the most fascinating part of the film is Binoche's full-bodied and fully realised character, a modern woman who tries to raise a child, have a job and handle all her affairs as well as she can. It is often difficult and at times seems impossible, but there is always a consolation at hand in the form of her creative work and the love for her son, the latter expressed in an especially poignant scene towards the end in which the clings to him as if her life depended on it -- which it probably does.