The film is only 32 minutes long, very short, with basically no lines, just a little boy with soft blond hair, orange-trimmed streets, strange winds, scattered passers-by, and a red Shiny, rounded balloons. The little boy is the director's son, Pascal Lamorisse. Under the camera of his father, he chases a naughty balloon and wanders the streets of Paris. Can you imagine? A little boy and a red balloon became the best friends in the world. They are loyal to each other, depend on each other, never leave, and fight against the cruelty of bad boys (innocence and cruelty often go together). The director compiles fairy tales in reality, reminiscent of Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland, or Gu Cheng, who painted windows on the ground. They use poetry to defuse the harshness of life and make the cold stone also reveal the roughness. smile.
At the end of the film, the red balloon is taken away by the bad boys. They quarreled and threw stones at it. Suddenly, something flashed in front of the camera, and the balloon shook slightly. In the silence, the red balloon shrank little by little in an imperceptible but clearly sensible, swift and protracted gesture, like a heart so old that it could no longer beat. A child ran over and kicked it hard, bursting the balloon, shattering the last bit of naive luck of the audience.
But this is not the end. At this moment, the balloons all over Paris escaped from their owners. Blue, green, yellow, white, purple, pink, and, of course, red. As if inspired, they flew over Paris and flew into the hands of the little boy Pascal. When Pascal grabbed the colorful bubbles, swayed off the roof and flew into the sky, as if to announce to the tired adults, there is still such a thing: forever pure, forever young, forever stubborn, no one can destroy.
"Scottish Film Critics" said: "After a filmmaker has experienced the red balloon at that moment, who would dare to show a red balloon on the screen again? Or, who would dare to show that the balloon is not red?" Indeed, so, five Eleven years later, Hou Hsiao-hsien, who was also good at taking long shots, made Le Voyage du Ballon Rouge (Le Voyage du Ballon Rouge), a tribute to La Maurice's red balloons, which also swayed around the city. , but this is another story.
Everyone was fascinated by the plump red balloon, except Truffaut. He said that this is not a real fairy tale, but a human obscenity. A tragic ending that feels thorny and hastily ends is a disguised sense of tragedy—it's just so that it doesn't confront the contradiction head on.
Maybe he's right. The so-called eternal purity, eternal youth, eternal stubbornness, and no one can eliminate it is nothing more than a collective obscenity of young people resisting adult society. But so what? Let's have a short and sweet dream together with the dreamy red balloon, "like childhood, but also like love".
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