Red Zeppelin

Sydney Morning Herald

Friday May 30, 2008

Helen Barlow

A newly blonde Juliette Binoche shares the screening with a floating object in The Flight Of The Red Balloon. HELEN BARLOW reports.

French actress Juliette Binoche is known for her flawless complexion, plush pink lips, luminous eyes and raven hair. So it came as a surprise on meeting the 44-year-old more than a year ago, to find her hair was bleached blonde. "Oh, I'm blonde in the movie I'm shooting for Hou Hsiao-hsien in France," she says. "It's called The Flight Of The Red Balloon."

The film, the first French production by the Taiwanese auteur, is one of five movies Binoche made in 10 months, along with Dan In Real Life, a Hollywood money earner; Paris, Cedric Klapisch's French hit; Disengagement, directed by Israel's Amos Gitai; and the French film Summer Hours.

"I really wanted to work with Hou Hsiao-hsien for his first time in France," she later explains when promoting the completed film, "because I love his movies and how he makes them. He doesn't really work with actors. There are no rehearsals and he uses little dialogue, so you have a freedom somehow. He has no mission of control."

Hou's films rarely make it to Australian cinemas. Yet the Taiwanese director, who is known for his naturalistic approach to filming everyday life, has a considerable following in France. As with many of his films (including Three Times and Millennium Mambo), The Flight Of The Red Balloon premiered in Cannes. It's the first in a series commissioned by the Musee d'Orsay gallery, the home of many a French impressionist masterwork.

Loosely inspired by Albert Lamorisse's 1956 short film The Red Balloon, Hou's movie follows a brilliant balloon on its lonely trajectory above the ochre-coloured Parisian rooftops. The lonely people it surveys are Binoche's Suzanne, a single mother who works voicing puppets at a local Chinese theatre, her neglected son, Simon, and his Chinese nanny, Song.

Simon and Song spend part of their days walking around the Paris streets and parks while Suzanne is busy at work. Suzanne's wild hair, Binoche says, was part of the character.

"I thought it was terrific," she cackles. "I think Suzanne's off, she's completely away somewhere else. She's in chaos, she's in crisis and thank God she has the puppet world to give her an escape into her imagination, as her son has with the red balloon. She has to survive knowing that her son's father is not coming back and she has to bring him up alone. I think you have to have extremes in order to represent something specific. My way of dressing in the movie and the hair was related to her state of mind. Also I probably wanted to distance myself from the character."

Binoche is a working mother. She has two children, 14-year-old Raphael and eight-year-old Hannah. She had only two weeks to prepare for The Flight Of The Red Balloon but one thing she already knew was how to make the puppets' voices.

"I tell stories to my daughter and son every night, so I'm used to making a lot of voices and I love it. Doing the puppets' voices came naturally to me, I had so much training with own kids."

THE FLIGHT OF THE RED BALLOON

Director Hou Hsiao-hsien Stars Juliette Binoche, Simon Iteanu, Hippolyte Girardot Rated PG. Screening now.

© 2008 Sydney Morning Herald

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