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Forget Seinfeld. If you really want to see a show about nothing, start reciting your mantra now and stretch your attention span accordingly for The Flight Of The Red Balloon.
It's a real-time-obsessed, serenely-slow French homage to a 1956 Oscar-winning short you've probably never seen, directed here by a Taiwanese filmmaker whose work you're probably unfamiliar with, unless you subscribe to Cahiers du Cinema or hold a Cinematheque membership.
Director Hsiao-hsien Hou took the inspiration for this minimalist art-film/domestic drama from The Red Balloon, a surrealist short about a balloon that follows a young boy through the streets of Paris.
And the balloon certainly gives a remarkable performance in Flight Of The Red Balloon.
The movie opens with several minutes of its rise and fall and perilous encounters with commuter trains. It's reminiscent of the windblown-bag scene in American Beauty, except the bag didn't get enough screentime to qualify it for membership in the Screen Actors' Guild.
I'm being glib about a movie some hail as a masterpiece.
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It is also a movie others reportedly walked out on last year at Cannes. Flight Of The Red Balloon is linear in that it has something of a plot (albeit without resolution), but it holds no regard for acts or character arcs, and its scenes are random and metaphoric (in one scene, Song, a little boy's nanny, makes crepes in real time).
And yet, by the end, I think I was starting to "get" it. Sort of.
Or it may simply be that Juliette Binoche could hold my attention reading un annuaire telephonique.
In Flight Of The Red Balloon, Binoche plays Suzanne, a frazzled director of a Chinese puppet theatre. In no particular hurry, it is revealed that she's frazzled because the father of her child Simon (Simon Iteanu) is on an extended in-residence teaching stint in Montreal, his obnoxious, deadbeat friend Marc (Hippolyte Girardot) is inhabiting a downstairs apartment and not paying rent, and she misses her daughter Louise (Louise Margolin), who is in college in Brussels, and seen only in flashbacks.
Meanwhile, she hires an almost transcendentally calm young film student named Song (Fang Song) to mind her boy. As Suzanne races toward wit's end, Song shares with Simon her plan to shoot an homage to The Red Balloon, and soon, said balloon -- real and imaginary -- becomes a motif in their lives. Their shared world of imagery becomes an oasis amid Suzanne's increasing uptightedness. Finally -- sometime after Song is conscripted as a translator for a visiting Chinese puppet director -- Suzanne seems to absorb Song's calm, almost by osmosis.
The act of writing this makes The Flight Of The Red Balloon sound less languid than it is.
Who knows? You might be in the mood for a slowly unspooling objet d'art filmique with flashes of brilliance in composition and framing. Or you might want to see Iron Man again.
(This film is rated PG)