The Flight of the Red Balloon

In The Flight of the Red Balloon, Hou Hsiao-Hsien’s first film with French dialogue, he draws on Albert Lamirosse’s magical children’s film, The Red Balloon (1956). A film student in Paris, Song (Song Fang) begins working for Suzanne (Juliette Binoche) as a nanny to Suzanne’s son Simon (Simon Itaneau). Simon and Song are both quiet and introspective, and so are well suited to spending time together. Suzanne is a puppeteer who lives for her work. Although commanding and accomplished with her puppets, her day to day life is disorganised and dramatic. She has a tenant who hasn’t paid rent for a year, a missing boyfriend, and a daughter who lives in Brussels. While Simon and Song dream of the red balloon, Suzanne struggles with her overflowing life. Meditative in pace, the film’s greatest strength is Hsiao-Hsien’s quietly original use of mise-en-scene.

Looking down a twisting staircase we see the elbows of two men, struggling to carry something up the stairs. A woman steps into the frame – from this angle we see the top of her head, then she dissappears under the overhang again, taking a trolley from the workmen. Gradually the men come into view, carrying a piano. This kind of framing, where for quite some time the characters are obscured from view, and the architectural space dominates the screen is something that can be seen running through all of Hsiao- Hsien’s work. I love this way of filming, partly because it has a visual beauty and allows the space to speak for the characters, but also because it is a choice that I wish I thought of more often.

The camera movement in The Flight of the Red Balloon is smooth and sweeping, like the movement of the balloon itself. You can feel Hsiao-Hsien’s love of cinema in every shot. The movement of the characters is also natural and fluid. Song hovers awkwardly when she finds herself thrown into this madhouse with little instruction of what she is expected to do. But while in some films having an actor looking awkward can draw attention to the constructedness of the shot, in this case it is completely right for the character and the mise-en-scene. In the tiny apartment, a space that could easily look like a stage set, and in scenes where Suzanne is shouting and crying, the camera is serene and unobtrusive, the composition natural, with the light filled kitchen providing a visual release from the chaos of the main living area.

The meditative sequences of the balloon floating that are placed between the scenes of drama are beautifully paced. The balloon dances across the screen and the camera sweeps after it. Then as the balloon drifts away, the camera rests on the landscape until the balloon glides back into frame in a lyrical game of cat and mouse. At the very end of the film, the camera pans up to look through the roof of the Musee d’Orsay (the film was commissioned by the museum), the lines of the windows stretching in horizontals across the frame. The red balloon floats gently above the roof before climbing up into the blue sky.

When I was walking into the cinema, I overheard someone coming out say, ‘It just didn’t have any depth,’ but I disagree with this statement. As in some of the European cinema of the 1950’s and 60’s, the deep suffering of his characters is alluded to through the mood of the film rather than shown overtly. All the characters in The Flight of the Red Balloon are effused with a longing for something other than the moment they are in, and the story of the red balloon is a perfect reflection of this melancholy desire for an innocence that may be only a dream.

The Killing of a Chinese Bookie

The Killing of a Chinese Bookie is my favourite Cassavetes film. With it’s blown out lighting, lyrical camera work and strong colour, it is visually a very beautiful work. Although ostensibly a gangster film, The Killing of a Chinese Bookie spends most of it’s running time exploring its protagonist, the night club owner Cosmo Vitelli (Ben Gazzara). Gambling, Cosmo runs into debt and is contracted to assasinate a small time bookkeeper who is making trouble for a group of rather banal looking gangsters. He does so, only to discover that this bookie was in fact a powerful underworld figure. The gangsters had intended Cosmo himself to be killed, so they could take over his club. Infuriated with his unexpected success, the gangsters attempt to kill Cosmo themselves, but he eludes them and returns to his beloved strip joint. This seems like a potentially action filled plot, but for most of the film, we watch Cosmo in his club, we see the shows he has created, and we see him run into a string of detours on the way to the bookie’s house. The plot action itself, the moment where he kills the bookmaker, happens in the blink of an eye.

The film opens with Cosmo pulling up outside a café where he has a meeting to make a debt payment. As he gets out of the taxi the late afternoon sun hits the camera, creating prisms of light that run diagonally across the screen, disrupting the composition of the shot and drawing attention away from the action. As Cosmo heads toward the café, the camera follows, swinging around to point directly at the sun. The lens flare becomes so intense it obliterates Cosmo’s face with a disc of white light. Cassavetes embraces this aesthetic. All through the film character’s faces are frequently masked with light, or shrouded in darkness. For me, this becomes a visual way of suggesting that there is more to these people, to the film itself, than what can be expressed through the story.

As in Faces and Shadows, here Cassavetes often allows the frame to become abstract as the camera wanders away from the action, or the actors flip out of frame as they move. This happens a lot in the scenes in the club, where the light on stage is particularly harsh. The performers are washed out and flattened, their faces sometimes cast with the red or blue of the club’s lighting. According to Ray Carney in Cassavetes on Cassavetes, Cassavetes used gels to create the lurid colour, and not everyone agreed with the look. Apparently Al Ruban left the production, thinking the unsual lighting wouldn’t work.

In addition to the planes of colour created by the direct coloured light, a zoom lens is used to follow the performers onstage, often resulting in a blur of soft focus light and colour, disjointed limbs framed like dashes of paint in an abstract expressionist painting. In that searching curious way Cassavetes’ camerawork so often has, the screen will be given over to a shaking feather boa, or the glittery beaded curtains that hang over the stage, while action that is happening out of frame occurs on the soundtrack.

This is inventive and expressionistic filmmaking. The visuality of the film takes on the emotional excesses that in films like A Woman Under the Influence and Love Streams is contained in the acting. Because of this, The Killing of a Chinese Bookie is for me Cassavetes’ most cinematic film – the film where he pushes the qualities of the film stock and the abilities of the camera to create something quite otherworldly.