Stowaway in the Sky (Albert Lamorisse, 1960)

André Gille and Pascal Lamorisse in Stowaway in the Sky

Cast: André Gille, Pascal Lamorisse, Maurice Baquet. Screenplay: Albert Lamorisse. Cinematography: Maurice Fellous, Guy Tabary. Production design: Pierre-Louis Thévenet. Film editing: Pierre Gillette. Music: Jean Prodromidès. 

After the success of his short film The Red Balloon (1956), Albert Lamorisse conceived another aerial adventure on a larger scale. It became his first feature, Stowaway in the Sky, and also starred his son, Pascal. It's a fanciful tale of an inventor (André Gille) who develops what he thinks is a revolutionary ballooning technique. On the maiden flight, his young grandson (Pascal) manages to scramble aboard after clinging to the gondola at liftoff. The inventor reluctantly allows the boy to accompany him on the flight, and they set off on a series of adventures that take them over spectacular French landscapes from Brittany to the Camargue and into close encounters with the Strasbourg Cathedral, the Eiffel Tower, and Mont Blanc. They're tracked on the ground by an assistant (Maurice Baquet), who gets into comic scrapes of his own. To get the effects he needed for the film, Lamorisse helped develop a shock-absorbing mechanism called Helivision, which eliminated the vibrations of a camera mounted on a helicopter. All of the aerial sequences were shot this way, including those that appear to be taking place inside the gondola of the balloon: A half-basket was attached to the side of the helicopter and the actors rode in it while filming took place. Although there is some dialogue in setting up the premise and advancing what plot there is, it's essentially a silent film. Jack Lemmon, who liked the film so much that he bought the rights to it,  added his own voiceover narration scripted by S.N. Behrman for the American release. I haven't seen it, but some who have think it detracts from the charm of the film, which is often breathtakingly beautiful. 

Flight of the Red Balloon (Hou Hsiao-Hsien, 2007)

The Red Balloon (Albert Lamorisse, 1956) is a short film that won the Oscar for best original screenplay, even though it's only a little over half an hour long and has only a few lines of spoken dialogue. In it, a boy (writer-director Lamorisse's young son, Pascal) on his way to school finds a large red balloon that has become caught in a lamppost. He soon discovers that he can't take the balloon with him on a bus or into his school, but the balloon is waiting for him after classes. He's also forbidden to bring the balloon into his home, but it floats up to his bedroom window and he lets it in. Over the next couple of days, the balloon tags along, sometimes getting the boy into trouble, until it's finally punctured by a rock fired from another boy's slingshot and slowly dies. Whereupon balloons from all over Paris flock to the boy, who gathers them and floats away over the rooftops. It's a small charmer, with ravishing views of 1950s Paris by cinematographer Edmond Séchan. The balloon becomes emblematic of childhood innocence in conflict with the daily grind of adulthood, which is why I think it still strikes a chord with audiences and, in the case of Taiwanese director Hou Hsiao-Hsien, inspired an hommage: The Voyage of the Red Balloon. Hou's film, which he co-wrote with François Margolin, is nearly four times the length of Lamorisse's and doesn't have such a neatly symbolic resolution. In it, a boy, Simon (Simon Iteanu), lives with his mother, Suzanne (Juliette Binoche), in a cramped Paris apartment. Suzanne is a puppeteer -- a profession that links her with childhood -- who hires a Chinese film student, Song (Fang Song), as a part-time nanny for Simon. Song is working on her own homage to The Red Balloon, and we see bits of it as she poses Simon with a balloon and films it floating around the city. But much of Hou's film deals with the domestic turmoil that surrounds Simon as Suzanne, a divorcee, tries to cope with juggling career and household problems. She leases part of the building to Marc (Hippolyte Girardot), who has been stiffing her on the rent and tends to pop into her apartment at odd times to use her kitchen and leave it a mess. She is trying to evict him so she'll have a place for her daughter, who lives with Suzanne's ex-husband in Brussels, to stay when she comes to Paris in the summer. Simon patiently endures his mother's frazzled nerves and finds a companion in Song, who quietly manages to bring a little order into the household. By film's end, nothing is really resolved in their lives, but a red balloon peeps into the apartment windows and floats above the skylight over Simon's bed, as if childhood has persisted for the time being against all the assaults against it. It's a poetic, meditative kind of film that gains its strength from immersing us into the lives of others. It seems to me to stretch out a little longer than it should, but it features another terrific performance by Binoche.