Flight of the Red Balloon
This too feels more like a post-modernist art thing rather than a conventional movie. But I found it more baffling and irritating than satisfying. The same could be said for Hou Hsiao-hsien’s widely overpraised last film, Three Times, which I saw at last year’s New York Film Festival. Taking the famous 1956 French short movie for children, The Red Balloon, as a starting point, Hou provides a nearly plotless, mostly inert two-hour film that is likely to drive most audiences to distraction. (It certainly will hold no interest at all for young children.) Hou’s aesthetic is one I don’t share. Yet there are haunting moments, mostly involving the unexplained “behavior” of the vaguely anthropomorphized red balloon of the title. The photography and the Paris settings are lovely. And Juliette Binoche gives an effective performance as a high-strung performer involved in artsy puppet plays. Just don’t expect anything resembling a narrative; the film floats and drifts along, like a big red balloon.
I Just Didn’t Do It
This effective Japanese film concerns a young man falsely accused of groping a teenage girl on a Tokyo subway. We follow him methodically, step by step, through the Japanese police and court systems. The practices and customs of the detectives, the lawyers and the judges seem just odd and exotic enough to American eyes and ears to add an extra fascination to the story. At 143 minutes, it is certainly long, but never tedious, and the length probably adds to the impact of, and our sympathy for, the young man’s plight. The excellent actors add greatly to the moving humanism of this sleeper. This is director Masayuki Suo’s first film since the hit Shall We Dance in 1996.
Actresses
As I have noted before, the protagonists of French movies are often exasperating and charming at the same time. Valeria Bruni Tedeschi, the writer and director of this film, also stars as a decidedly neurotic stage actress involved in a production of Turgenev’s A Month in the Country. She’s experiencing a midlife crisis, acutely feeling the lack of romance (and children) in her life. The resulting comedy in this well-acted movie often nears slapstick silliness, and our heroine has entirely too many visions of dead people from her past (as well as the fictional character she is playing on stage). But the movie is nonetheless entertaining in a bittersweet way.
Article comments
1 - Tan The Man
That's a pretty diverse slate of films you saw. Was that how the festival as a whole set up? Mix of older and newer films?
2 - handyguy
The new movies [including some higher profile ones I chose to wait and see in theaters, like the Coen Brothers' No Country for Old Men and Todd Haynes's I'm Not There] get more play. They run twice each in a 1,000-plus-seat house, and opening and closing night films play in a 2,000-seat symphony hall. The revivals run once or twice in the 280-seat Walter Reade, one of the best places in the country to see a movie.