Le Ballon Rouge
Okay, so the scenery is great and the premise is utterly adorable, but I must admit that I don’t quite understand why this movie is so incredibly popular. Unlike Truffaut’s little boy, the actors are not all that great, and the cinematography is okayish. It would make sense if the movie did not have dialogue at all and dialogue would have been unnecessary too, so I was confused every single time the main character actually spoke.
Perhaps I’m just not all too fond of the story. While I was mesmerized by the first few scenes where there was nothing but the boy and his balloon, the story quickly became somewhat boring for me? Just like with Requiem for a Dream, I probably just completely fail at understanding what is so great about this film except that it looks beautiful and the characterization of the balloon is quite wonderful.
I wonder if I want to see Hou Hsiao-Hsien’s „Le voyage du ballon rouge“. His movies are a hit or miss for me after all.
heh, I thought the greatest part of the movie was the ending, when he took off with the bunch of balloons :) I think I would have been pretty stunned by that as a kid, because, well, it actually looks pretty real when the film shows it? LOL.
i heard that HHH’s version is basically a mellowed-out and slightly more dramatized long-version of the film, with the balloon being less of a “main character” and more like an occasional “mood-thing” inbetween. haha.
for me with HHH, it has been one great upsetting “miss” which was “Good Men, Good Women”, and the rest were pretty consistent “hits”. (intensely recommended: “The Puppet Master”, “The Boys from Fengkuei” and “A Summer at Grandpa’s”)
(I should probably add, that I was actually pretty fond of “Good Men Good Women” when I saw it first – even with the absolutely ridiculous subtitles. But then I saw it again during this little HHH-programme in a Munich cinema and actually thought it stupidly over-conceptualized and tedious. Hit/Miss indeed! xD)
The ending was beautiful! But it felt so pointless? Slowly I am feeling that I understand the point of the story, but I’m still unsure whether I like it…
I really want to see more of his movies if it just were not this fear of landing one of those misses. Maybe it really depends on my mood for watching those things too.