Except for the lonely and beautiful ending in the Musée d'Orsay, which is the finishing touch of the film. Hou Hsiao-hsien's excellent film "The Red Balloon Ride" moves away from these stereotypes, so that a film about life in Paris doesn't focus too much on the city itself. Perhaps based on or due to being too familiar with Albert Lamorris' children's classic The Red Balloon, Hou Hsiao-hsien shifted the focus from the child and the red balloon to the child, his tired mother, and his new Chinese nanny, a On young filmmakers with student visas.
The nanny (played successfully by Song Fang), with her surprising level of focus, begins to make a student film about the red balloons flying over downtown Paris, where she lives, with her roommate Simon. actors in the film. As she explains how to make the balloon move exactly as she planned, Song briefly talks about the inexperienced film and the decline of contemporary low-budget filmmaking, and Hou Hsiao-hsien's behind-the-scenes perspective through his own films. Simon's father, a writer who volunteers to wander in Montreal, communicates with him only by phone, but his presence is a fitting irony for Simon's mother's interactions with his father's friend and current tenant, Mark.
Binoche is a dream, like the city in the movie, and Hou Hsiao-hsien erases her original symbolism, with her messy black hair dyed a bad blonde, usually the centerpiece of the film in "Red Balloons". "The Journey" was completely subverted, and her charm turned into an unreasonable neuroticism. Even with this dislocation, Binoche delivers her best acting skills on a date, a patient who is immediately and thoroughly self-conscious and thoughtful.
The year is full of French films, but ironically, the most successful French film of the year was made by the Chinese-born, Taiwan-educated Hou Hsiao-hsien. Just like Wong Kar-wai devoted himself to the production of the foreign-language film [My Blueberry Night] for the first time, Hou Hsiao-hsien continued to think about how to present the Chinese-style loneliness, loneliness, and contrived love he was good at to foreign audiences, and the film still focused on urban life And the polarizing influence of travel, this powerful force is also strongly reflected in the 2005 master work [Coffee Hour]. However, Wong Kar-wai's attempt lured the directors into unavoidable mistakes, and "The Journey of the Red Balloon" reflects Hou Hsiao-hsien's surprising power in both aesthetic and technical aspects. Like Hou Hsiao-hsien's other works, this "Red Balloon's Journey" seems to be the concentrated explosion of all his previous works.
Coupled with the masterful photography level of photographer Li Pingbin, Hou Hsiao-hsien can fully express the origin of the characters almost without lines, and can reflect all the plots in the film in the established environment. The cramped apartments, the shadowy puppet theatre, the narrow Parisian streets, all created the right atmosphere for Hou Hsiao-hsien's actors. The eye-catching, splendid long shot seems to be gradually showing the beauty, but only with the soft background music designed by Chu Shih Yi, the picture can quietly and effortlessly unravel all the intricate relationships. Hou Hsiao-hsien's shot wanders the apartment as Susan and Mark quarrel fiercely downstairs, while Song and Ximen prepare their midday snacks, and while a blind tuner is repairing a piano. The voices and movements of all the characters blend together, interact, climax, and then descend gently, and I don't think you've seen such ecstasy in any other film this year.
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