Reviews
Flight of the Red Balloon and The Orphanage
Commissioned by the Musée d'Orsay and riffing on The Red Balloon, Albert Lamorisse's Oscar-winning 1956 short, The Flight of the Red Balloon is Taiwanese auteur Hou Hsiao-hsien's most accessible picture to date. That said, it's also a typically measured and visually sublime treatise on our inability to communicate in an increasingly impersonal world, as well as an affectionate paean to the unique gift that children possess for being impervious to the gravest of events happening around them.
Alternately charging between appointments and complaining about her hopeless husband and an irresponsible neighbour, Juliette Binoche excels as the actress whose chaotic existence leaves young son Simon Iteanu in the company of Song Fang, a film student-cum-nanny who challenges him to think about his situation. With the balloon symbolising freedom, rootlessness and isolation, as it floats around Paris, this is a consistently beautiful picture, with Mark Lee Ping Bing's camera capturing scenes in long, languorous takes. But it's also full of playful moments of self-reflexivity and poignant insights into families in which relationships are strained by the very act of sustaining them.
Philippe Aractingi's docudrama Under the Bombs was made in the honourable tradition of the rubble films that were produced in post-war Germany. However, an uneasy feeling of exploitation pervades proceedings, as while Nada Abou Farhat and Georges Khabbaz are obviously acting - as the Shi'ite mother searching with a Christian cabby for her lost son - the extras they encounter in the carnage caused by Israel's 2006 incursion into southern Lebanon are very much living with the terrible reality of loss and devastation.
Fascinating insights abound on the harrowing journey through the decimated landscape, such as Hezbollah using funerals as recruiting rallies. But such authentic details only reinforce the triviality of the burgeoning relationship between the aloofly chic Farhat and the genially lecherous Khabbaz. The cast and crew's courage and improvisational skill should be lauded, but the profundity the subject demands is too often absent.
d=3,3,1Even though it scarcely bothers to conceal the influence of Peter Pan and Henry James's The Turn of the Screw, first-timer Juan Antonio Bayona's The Orphanage is a subtle horror that has been produced by Guillermo del Toro, the director of the acclaimed Pan's Labyrinth. Returning to the home from which she was adopted to convert it into a care centre, Belén Rueda is dismayed when young son Roger Princep begins associating with some imaginary friends and producing drawings that echo her own childhood fears. But worse follows when Princep disappears during the grand opening after discovering that he's both adopted and HIV positive and Rueda is forced to call on the services of police psychologist Mabel Ribera and medium Geraldine Chaplin to find the boy and allay some of the demons from her past.
Exploring such notions as guilt, grief, corrupted innocence and rejection with disconcerting sincerity, this is a moving insight into the maternal instinct, as well as a highly cinematic chiller. A creepy cameo by Montserrat Carulla, as a bogus social worker whose dead son provides a clue to Princep's whereabouts, adds to the growing sense of unease that is deftly enhanced by Josep Rosell's atmospheric interiors and Oscar Faura's stealthy camerawork. Unfortunately, the séance sequence is disappointingly photographed in that night-vision green glow that is now becoming as much a generic cliché as the Blair Witch unsteady-cam technique.
d=3,3,1The Orphanage forms part of the 2008 programme for Viva! Spanish & Latin American Film Festival, which is just one of the many excellent events playing in London over the Easter period. The Argentinian contribution is particularly strong, with Esteban Sapir's silent pastiche La Antena and Anahí Berneri's Encarnación, which boasts a superb performance by theatre star Silvia Pérez, being the highlights. Also on offer is the French Film Festival, whose standout pictures are Pierre Salvadori's Hors de Prix, which features Audrey Tautou in fine form as a Riviera gold-digger, Claude Miller's meticulously structed post-war family melodrama Un Sécret, and Serge Bozon's Great War outing La France, which has to be one of the most remarkable musicals ever made.
Finally, the 22nd London Lesbian and Gay Film Festival combines compelling documentaries like Parvez Sharma's A Jihad for Love with a centenary tribute to the great Bette Davis and such new releases as Alek Keshishian's all-star London romcom Love and Other Disasters, and Angelina Maccarone's intriguing Christmas triptych, Vivere.
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