The fantastical films of French director Albert Lamorisse often limn the boundaries between the earthly and the sublime, with his characters trying to flee or transcend the physical limitations and demands of the material world through flight or the spiritual world of the imagination. In his most famous film, the Palme d’Or-winning short The Red Balloon, Lamorisse presents this dichotomy in a most elemental fashion, with his camera following a young boy, Pascal (Pascal Lamorisse), as he traipses about Paris with a balloon that appears to have a mind of its own.
There’s a consistent levity to the film as both boy and balloon engage in various sorts of play as they wander aimlessly about town. Yet their frivolity is met with resistance from a world that devalues the importance of joy and imagination, both through adults that won’t let Pascal inside places with his balloon and other children hell-bent on destroying the object. Lamorisse follows the shocking pop of the balloon with a transcendent final sequence that reaffirms Pascal’s innocent hopefulness, and without diminishing the dangers of the real world around him.
This tension between freedom and control is also central to the two animal-centric shorts Lamorisse made before The Red Balloon: Bim, the Little Donkey and White Mane. Both films feature young boys who take care of animals that other people want to kidnap or use for their own devices. And for all the majestic beauty Lamorisse captures, particularly in White Mane as Folco (Alain Emery) and the eponymous horse run free, the specter of entrapment looms large, giving the proceedings an urgency and suspense that make them all the more captivating.
Following the success of The Red Balloon, Lamorisse made two feature films, Stowaway in the Sky and Circus Angel, both of which, again, foregrounded flight as a means of embracing the fantastical and escaping the doldrums of daily life. While the latter film leans too hard into broad, farcical, and mostly dated humor that undermines its earnest attempts at Chaplinesque sentimentality, Stowaway in the Sky works as a gorgeous, airbound travelogue of a bygone France, much in the same way Red Balloon captured 1950s Paris.
Lamorisse created and patented an apparatus that stabilized cameras in helicopters, and that he used for Stowaway in the Sky. Even if it’s easy to take it for granted, as the innovation has informed air photography for over half a century, the sense of awe and wonder that Lamorisse seeked to evoke through the film’s extended airborne journey still comes through today.
Image/Sound
All five transfers in the Criterion Collection’s two-disc set are from recent restorations—4K for The Red Balloon and White Mane and 2K for the rest—and they look uniformly terrific. White Mane is particularly gorgeous, boasting consistently stark contrast in its black-and-white images and a level of detail that’s startling in the many wide shots of Southern France vistas. The color films all display a wide, naturalistic range of hues. As with White Mane, The Red Balloon is rich in detail, allowing the viewer to bask in the nostalgic beauty of mid-1950s Paris. On the audio front, the dialogue is clean, with a strong separation between all the background sounds.
Extras
In the 50-minute 2008 documentary My Father Was a Red Balloon, Pascal Lamorisse reminisces about working with his father on several films, both as an actor and in other capacities. Along with his daughter, Pascal also visits some filming locations of The Red Balloon and engages in some amusing conversations with teenagers who are outside near the school in the film. It’s a sweet and light-hearted affair, but it’s occasionally touching as well, especially when Pascal talks about the effect his father’s early death had on him. Pascal also shows up in a newly recorded interview, in which he discusses his father’s work as a photographer, improvising scenes in The Red Balloon and, most interestingly, the helicopter rig his dad created and patented while working on Stowaway in the Sky. Also included is a pair of short archival interviews with Albert Lamorisse, who delves into his filmmaking philosophy and how he got into working as a director. The package is rounded out with a handsome 26-page booklet that has a synopsis of each film and an essay by critic David Cairns, who pays particular attention to the darker undercurrents running throughout Lamorisse’s oeuvre.
Overall
Criterion’s two-disc set provides a well-rounded survey of the singular work of Albert Lamorisse.
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