The Balloons Are Flying
hou hsiao-hsien shoots in paris
I remember watching Hitchcock films at the age of 11 and never truly grasping that I was watching an artifact from the ’50s. All of the cultural context—fedoras, pencil skirts, Jimmy Stewart’s ridiculous accent—bounced off my young head. I thought these characters inhabited my world—I had no sense of history. I applied similar reasoning to any movie I saw. In Westerns, for example, I saw that cowboys wore jeans. Their jeans, I assumed, probably didn’t differ much from the Gap Kids jeans I wore. At that age, the fashion styles of the world could be reduced to one variable: the length of the inseam. But as we grow older, we develop a cultural vocabulary, we learn to spot skinny jeans and duly mock them.
As our analytical power grows, we learn not to understand. We develop the memory and skills to identify a scene in a film—America during the 1950s—and at the same time, we become aware of the distance between our grandparents and ourselves. The more we learn about their world, the more alien it seems. We begin to appreciate the gaps between perspectives, the limits of shared understanding.
My first experience with film director Hou Hsiao-hsien was quite the exercise in misunderstanding. On the advice of a crotchety old film critic, I rented Flowers in Shanghai some years ago. The style alone intimidates: the entire movie consists of a series of fades to black, punctuated by lengthy shots featuring slow pans back and forth, with nary a zoom. Critical character development occurs over the space of several minutes, and Hou rarely advertises which moments lend key insight into the plot and characters.
While revisiting some of Hou’s films in preparation to watch his latest feature, Flight of the Red Balloon, I asked Richard Peña, professor in the film division of the School of the Arts and program director for the prestigious New York Film Festival, whether the average Columbia student could relate to the films of Hou Hsiao-hsien. “Let’s just say,” he replied in an e-mail, “that in general Americans (the vast majority of Columbia students) aren’t really pre-disposed to anything that doesn’t resemble American cultural products. So Hou’s work might be off-putting anyway, but his style also goes against the quick-paced, music video style that dominates so much of American visual culture.” Peña also thinks, mind you, that Hou Hsiao-hsien is the greatest living film director.
But how accessible will Hou’s films be to audiences in general, aside from those who dedicate their lives to unraveling cinematic nuance? As it turns out, Flowers of Shanghai represents a sort of alienation for Hou himself: it was his first film not set in Taiwan, the country where he grew up. Moreover, the film takes place in Chinese brothels of the late 19th century, where behavior is governed by a strict and very confusing set of social customs. When I first saw Flowers of Shanghai, I spent several minutes trying to figure out a variation of “Rock, Paper, Scissors” that the characters played over their drinks. It never fully made sense to me, even after I watched it a dozen times.
This theme of cultural alienation continues over the course of Hou’s career. In 2003, Hou Hsiao-hsien released Café Lumière, his first movie set in Japan.
“Before making Café Lumière, I’d never imagined I could make a film abroad,” the director said in an interview while promoting his latest film. “I didn’t feel I knew well enough how people lived in other countries and other cultures.” Yet Café Lumière succeeds, despite—or perhaps because of—this initial alienation.
Perhaps the director is particularly open to those moments that transcend cultural context. In one scene of the film, a young pregnant woman tells a male friend about a dream she’s had, in which a mother is concerned because her baby has a prematurely wrinkled face. “It’s a goblin story, it comes from Europe,” her friend tells her. “There are many European stories like that.” He proceeds to find her a book that exactly matches her dream. Why should separate cultures share these dreams? For that matter, why should two people have anything in common at all?
In the films of Hou Hsiao-hsien, characters fade in and out of common understanding—cultural, generational, and artistic. In one especially provocative scene of Café Lumière, the same two characters stare at a piece of computer graphic art that the male friend has created. All starts well: she exclaims over his work, and he beams contentedly. As the shot continues (a full four minutes long), she begins to offer interpretations of his work, most of which he immediately discounts as irrelevant to his artistic vision. “Why are they different lengths?” she asks, referring to a series of trains. “No reason,” he curtly replies. She has more success when she asks about a splash of crimson, which he eagerly says represents blood. Suddenly the two characters laugh as if breaking an awkward tension, both having hit on the same view of his art. This fumbling communication occurs throughout Café Lumière, itself the story of a girl fundamentally separated from her conservative parents. Sometimes these gaps are bridged, and sometimes they are not.
This feeling of separation is especially emphasized in Hou’s latest film, The Flight of the Red Balloon. The film is Hou’s first to be set in France—the cast of characters includes a young boy, his tense mother, his filmmaker babysitter, and a red balloon that mysteriously follows him throughout the city of Paris. Many characters in the film are artists, and—as in Café Lumière—their relation to art simultaneously provokes misunderstanding and understanding. When the mother sits down to talk with the filmmaker about a movie the latter has made, she spends most of the conversation remembering her own past rather than discussing the filmmaker’s intentions. Similarly, the mother is a puppeteer, and she has just put together a French production of a famous Chinese puppet show. “She narrates the story,” Hou says, “and her own domestic situation is analogous” to the art she creates.
“But this is a French movie,” he continues, “and so I had to find a way to integrate a Chinese puppet-theater story into a French narrative.” This integration never feels seamless. There are several scenes of translation between characters (much as my quotes from the various films and the interview with Hou have been translated), and there are awkward moments where the babysitter, a foreign exchange student from Taiwan, makes mistakes while responding to the mother’s rapid-fire French. “Hou’s characters create their own countries,” Richard Peña says. “Dislocation in Hou is the natural state of affairs.”
The young boy, however, rarely picks up on this sense of alienation—cultural, generational, or artistic. He hasn’t yet developed the blindness we develop as adults: the knowledge of separation between two individuals. Near the end of the film, the boy steps into a museum with his class, and the children begin discussing a painting of a child and two adults. Some offer absurd analyses, but some strike close to the heart of the painting. When asked whether the painting is happy or sad, one child replies that it is both, for the child is in the sunlight, and the parents are in the dark. The same parallel applies, of course, to Flight of the Red Balloon, with its contrast between childlike innocence and the devolving life of a single mother. And thus several metaphors coalesce in one single scene, as children try to figure out a painting, never realizing how closely it imitates the life they have yet to experience.
In considering these movies, maybe it would have been best to follow the children’s example, not allowing my education to cloud my view. The kids weren’t agitated by the complex perspective of the painting, which depicted the adults on one plane and the children on another. Unconcerned, they offered their interpretations—some faulty and some insightful. Likewise, Richard Peña gently corrected some of my misconceptions and assumptions as I struggled with Hou’s cultural distance and stylistic complexity. For Hou’s films, and especially for Flight of the Red Balloon—a tale of children and foreign-exchange students—I needed some blindness, some naiveté. “I don’t think a deep understanding is needed,” Richard Peña says of Hou’s filmography, “I just think what’s needed is an openness to other ways of telling stories on screen.”