Two Short Fables That Revel in Freedom
ALBERT LAMORISSE’S “White Mane” (1953) and “The Red Balloon” (1956) are among the world’s most famous and most honored films for children. Both were prizewinners at Cannes, and “The Red Balloon,” which is 34 minutes long and contains about half a dozen lines of dialogue, improbably received an Oscar for its screenplay. But kids’ stuff they are not.
The stories are simple, fablelike; the heroes are boys; the subject in each case is the purity and power of a child’s imagination; and the tone of both films is that of open-mouthed wonder. Yet these movies are also shot through with a very adult melancholy, an awareness that life tends not to measure up to the glorious pictures in our minds. The young are enchanted by “White Mane” and “The Red Balloon.” Grown-ups, who know too well how fragile this beauty is, are likely to cry.
There has recently been a long overdue surge of interest in Mr. Lamorisse’s two great films, some of it sparked by the estimable Taiwanese director Hou Hsiao Hsien, whose feature-length homage, “Flight of the Red Balloon,” was screened at the New York Film Festival this fall. And starting Friday “White Mane” and “The Red Balloon” will be shown on a double-bill at the Film Forum in Manhattan, in superbly restored prints. “White Mane” also has a new English-language narration by Peter Strauss, which is a more scrupulous translation of the original French than previous versions. (The earliest, written by James Agee, is gorgeous, but — not surprisingly — a good deal more verbose than Mr. Lamorisse’s spare text.)
The most striking benefit of the restorations, though, is the delicate color of “The Red Balloon,” which heightens the contrast between the muted loveliness of Paris streets (it always looks like first light, somehow) and the bold, stunningly incongruous red of the title object. In a less vibrant print “The Red Balloon” would still be touching and ingenious, but it wouldn’t be half as funny.
If you haven’t seen the film since attaining the age of reason, you might have forgotten how dryly brilliant its (mostly) silent comedy is: Mr. Lamorisse times the balloon’s entrances and exits from the frame with the precision of a crack farceur.
At the beginning of the movie a schoolboy (played by Pascal Lamorisse, the filmmaker’s son) happens on a large, fortuitously untethered balloon, and, knowing a good thing when he sees one, grabs the string and claims it as his own, as if it were a stray mutt. (Or — to cite a movie that, 25 years later, took possession of the spirit of “The Red Balloon”— as if it were E. T.) Pascal then discovers, to his delight, that his new toy/pet is eminently trainable. He teaches it to follow him, off string, and to wait faithfully for him when he’s at school, on a bus or in one of the many other places where big balloons are not welcome.
The movie is essentially a series of elegant slapstick routines, in which the balloon — which has its mischievous side — darts or bobs or soars, as the situation requires, and gets laughs from the constant surprise of its appearances and disappearances. The sheer absurdity of giving a balloon the personality of a friendly, frisky dog is, of course, central to every one of Mr. Lamorisse’s gags, and it’s a conceit that could easily have become mighty tiresome. But he knows enough to keep the action brisk and the movie short, and he doesn’t press his luck by treating us, as a lesser artist might, to close-ups of his small hero’s happy face. Everything in “The Red Balloon” happens, as it should in physical comedy, in long and medium shots: no special pleading, no unseemly appeals for the viewer’s approval.
When the film is over, you realize that although you’ve been entirely enveloped in little Pascal’s fantasy world, you’ve learned next to nothing about the boy himself. His parents are not in evidence. He lives with a stout, black-clad, rather fearsome-looking old woman who may or may not be his grandmother. We’re given no idea whether he’s a good, bad or indifferent student, or who his friends are. The intensity of his attachment to the balloon suggests that he’s a lonely, dreamy child, living in his own head, but we can’t be sure; the movie gives us nothing solid to go on.
With such a skimpy back story the film runs the risk of abstraction, but Mr. Lamorisse’s reticence has the odd, bracing effect of making everything he chooses not to show us seem deeply irrelevant. All that matters here are the balloon, the boy (whoever he is) and the steep, narrow streets of Ménilmontant, where they play together.
Just how unnecessary the particulars of the boy’s “real” (i.e. nonballoon) life really are is emphasized, inadvertently, by Mr. Hou’s “Flight of the Red Balloon,” which will be released theatrically in the spring. That movie’s boy, named Simon (Simon Iteanu), has real life to burn, a messy one with a frazzled single mother (played by Juliette Binoche) in a cramped apartment. And when a red balloon enters this boy’s life, courtesy of the young Asian film student (Song Fang) who has been hired as his nanny, the contrast between his imaginative world and the world he actually inhabits feels, with all this extra detail, too pointed; Mr. Hou manages to keep poignancy at bay, but it’s touch and go.
We don’t know much, either, about the boy named Folco (Alain Emery) whose story is told in “White Mane.” He comes from a family of fishermen in the marshy southwestern region of France called the Camargue, where wild horses roam in packs. His household consists of a bushy-bearded, unidentified elderly gent and a little brother (Pascal Lamorisse, a toddler then). The lone important fact about Folco, as far as Mr. Lamorisse is concerned, is his relationship with White Mane, the alpha stallion of the herd, who, the narrator tells us, doesn’t like men but who comes to trust this boy. In a way this 39-minute, black-and-white movie is a draft of “The Red Balloon”: the unrulier, more disturbing story of which the later film is a charming, whimsical variation
“White Mane” is no less carefully composed than its better-known successor: both pictures have the economy, the clarity of purpose and the pleasing symmetry of a sonnet. For Albert Lamorisse, who began and ended his career as a documentary filmmaker, the difference lies in the landscape. A metaphorical balloon would make no more sense (even comic sense) in the Camargue than an untamed stallion would in the streets of Paris; and although both, in their respective films, represent the freedom of the imagination and both, consequently, have enemies, the threat feels much graver in “White Mane.” The envious boys with slingshots who chase down Pascal’s balloon are almost parodies of the fierce-looking riders of the Camargue pursuing White Mane for the worst and commonest reason — for the awful joy of breaking a creature freer than they are.
As Folco rides the horse, bareback, across the marshes, over the dunes and through the strange, sparse, gnarled vegetation of his native region, you sense, as in few other films, the real terrors of nature, its arbitrariness and flat indifference reflected in the very changeability of its beauty. (Compared with this, both the attractions and the dangers of the city seem like child’s play.)
It takes an extraordinary filmmaker to evoke that sort of feeling and then to cap his thrilling climactic chase with an image as ecstatic as it is disquieting, the distant sight of a boy and a horse heading out to sea. “The Red Balloon” ends with a similar flourish of ambiguous release, but it is, appropriately (and literally), a lighter one.
And Lamorisse, these movies show, really was a remarkable artist: one of the cinema’s best poets and a fearless explorer of the scary and exhilarating outbacks of the imagination. He lived for 14 years after “The Red Balloon,” mostly making documentaries. While he was shooting what would be his last picture, “The Lovers’ Wind,” in Tehran in 1970, his helicopter crashed; he was 48. Even he might not have been capable of imagining a more fitting end: He rose to get a clearer, freer view of the world, and fell from the sky.
Everett Collection
Pascal Lamorisse, the son of the filmmaker Albert Lamorisse, in “The Red Balloon” from 1956.
There has recently been a long overdue surge of interest in Mr. Lamorisse’s two great films, some of it sparked by the estimable Taiwanese director Hou Hsiao Hsien, whose feature-length homage, “Flight of the Red Balloon,” was screened at the New York Film Festival this fall. And starting Friday “White Mane” and “The Red Balloon” will be shown on a double-bill at the Film Forum in Manhattan, in superbly restored prints. “White Mane” also has a new English-language narration by Peter Strauss, which is a more scrupulous translation of the original French than previous versions. (The earliest, written by James Agee, is gorgeous, but — not surprisingly — a good deal more verbose than Mr. Lamorisse’s spare text.)
The most striking benefit of the restorations, though, is the delicate color of “The Red Balloon,” which heightens the contrast between the muted loveliness of Paris streets (it always looks like first light, somehow) and the bold, stunningly incongruous red of the title object. In a less vibrant print “The Red Balloon” would still be touching and ingenious, but it wouldn’t be half as funny.
If you haven’t seen the film since attaining the age of reason, you might have forgotten how dryly brilliant its (mostly) silent comedy is: Mr. Lamorisse times the balloon’s entrances and exits from the frame with the precision of a crack farceur.
At the beginning of the movie a schoolboy (played by Pascal Lamorisse, the filmmaker’s son) happens on a large, fortuitously untethered balloon, and, knowing a good thing when he sees one, grabs the string and claims it as his own, as if it were a stray mutt. (Or — to cite a movie that, 25 years later, took possession of the spirit of “The Red Balloon”— as if it were E. T.) Pascal then discovers, to his delight, that his new toy/pet is eminently trainable. He teaches it to follow him, off string, and to wait faithfully for him when he’s at school, on a bus or in one of the many other places where big balloons are not welcome.
The movie is essentially a series of elegant slapstick routines, in which the balloon — which has its mischievous side — darts or bobs or soars, as the situation requires, and gets laughs from the constant surprise of its appearances and disappearances. The sheer absurdity of giving a balloon the personality of a friendly, frisky dog is, of course, central to every one of Mr. Lamorisse’s gags, and it’s a conceit that could easily have become mighty tiresome. But he knows enough to keep the action brisk and the movie short, and he doesn’t press his luck by treating us, as a lesser artist might, to close-ups of his small hero’s happy face. Everything in “The Red Balloon” happens, as it should in physical comedy, in long and medium shots: no special pleading, no unseemly appeals for the viewer’s approval.
When the film is over, you realize that although you’ve been entirely enveloped in little Pascal’s fantasy world, you’ve learned next to nothing about the boy himself. His parents are not in evidence. He lives with a stout, black-clad, rather fearsome-looking old woman who may or may not be his grandmother. We’re given no idea whether he’s a good, bad or indifferent student, or who his friends are. The intensity of his attachment to the balloon suggests that he’s a lonely, dreamy child, living in his own head, but we can’t be sure; the movie gives us nothing solid to go on.
With such a skimpy back story the film runs the risk of abstraction, but Mr. Lamorisse’s reticence has the odd, bracing effect of making everything he chooses not to show us seem deeply irrelevant. All that matters here are the balloon, the boy (whoever he is) and the steep, narrow streets of Ménilmontant, where they play together.
Just how unnecessary the particulars of the boy’s “real” (i.e. nonballoon) life really are is emphasized, inadvertently, by Mr. Hou’s “Flight of the Red Balloon,” which will be released theatrically in the spring. That movie’s boy, named Simon (Simon Iteanu), has real life to burn, a messy one with a frazzled single mother (played by Juliette Binoche) in a cramped apartment. And when a red balloon enters this boy’s life, courtesy of the young Asian film student (Song Fang) who has been hired as his nanny, the contrast between his imaginative world and the world he actually inhabits feels, with all this extra detail, too pointed; Mr. Hou manages to keep poignancy at bay, but it’s touch and go.
We don’t know much, either, about the boy named Folco (Alain Emery) whose story is told in “White Mane.” He comes from a family of fishermen in the marshy southwestern region of France called the Camargue, where wild horses roam in packs. His household consists of a bushy-bearded, unidentified elderly gent and a little brother (Pascal Lamorisse, a toddler then). The lone important fact about Folco, as far as Mr. Lamorisse is concerned, is his relationship with White Mane, the alpha stallion of the herd, who, the narrator tells us, doesn’t like men but who comes to trust this boy. In a way this 39-minute, black-and-white movie is a draft of “The Red Balloon”: the unrulier, more disturbing story of which the later film is a charming, whimsical variation
“White Mane” is no less carefully composed than its better-known successor: both pictures have the economy, the clarity of purpose and the pleasing symmetry of a sonnet. For Albert Lamorisse, who began and ended his career as a documentary filmmaker, the difference lies in the landscape. A metaphorical balloon would make no more sense (even comic sense) in the Camargue than an untamed stallion would in the streets of Paris; and although both, in their respective films, represent the freedom of the imagination and both, consequently, have enemies, the threat feels much graver in “White Mane.” The envious boys with slingshots who chase down Pascal’s balloon are almost parodies of the fierce-looking riders of the Camargue pursuing White Mane for the worst and commonest reason — for the awful joy of breaking a creature freer than they are.
As Folco rides the horse, bareback, across the marshes, over the dunes and through the strange, sparse, gnarled vegetation of his native region, you sense, as in few other films, the real terrors of nature, its arbitrariness and flat indifference reflected in the very changeability of its beauty. (Compared with this, both the attractions and the dangers of the city seem like child’s play.)
It takes an extraordinary filmmaker to evoke that sort of feeling and then to cap his thrilling climactic chase with an image as ecstatic as it is disquieting, the distant sight of a boy and a horse heading out to sea. “The Red Balloon” ends with a similar flourish of ambiguous release, but it is, appropriately (and literally), a lighter one.
And Lamorisse, these movies show, really was a remarkable artist: one of the cinema’s best poets and a fearless explorer of the scary and exhilarating outbacks of the imagination. He lived for 14 years after “The Red Balloon,” mostly making documentaries. While he was shooting what would be his last picture, “The Lovers’ Wind,” in Tehran in 1970, his helicopter crashed; he was 48. Even he might not have been capable of imagining a more fitting end: He rose to get a clearer, freer view of the world, and fell from the sky.
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