First in Flight

Juliette Binoche creates art out of life.

No one embodies the term international star like Juliette Binoche.

She rose to prominence in The Unbearable Lightness of Being, an adaptation of a Czechoslovakian novel directed by an American, starring an Englishman and a Swede. She received worldwide acclaim for Blue, a French-language film by Polish director Krzyzstof Kieslowski. She won an Oscar for The English Patient, taken from a book by a Sri Lankan–born Canadian and directed by the late Anthony Minghella, who was British.

She’s currently filming The Certified Copy, a new film by Iranian auteur Abbas Kiarostami, making his first movie set in Italy. And this month, Binoche stars in Flight of the Red Balloon, the French debut of the master Taiwanese director Hou Hsiao-hsien, in which she plays a French vocalist for a Chinese puppet show.

It’s hardly surprising, then, that the language barrier with her director did not pose a problem.

“I’m used to it, because I’ve worked with so many different strangers, and I’ve been a stranger myself many, many times,” she said when we spoke to her last September in Toronto. “But you reach a point where language doesn’t matter, and where you come from doesn’t matter. You reach a universal feeling of the human being…and the intimacy makes it universal.”

The challenge of acting in Flight extended beyond communication. To put it mildly, Hou is not thought of as an actors’ director (“Like Kiarostami,” Binoche notes when the suggestion is raised). His movies are less about characters than the spaces between them; his themes emerge through lighting, framing and subtly allusive editing. His great Tokyo-set Café Lumière, his first film shot abroad and a sort of unofficial prequel to Flight, uses crisscrossing trains as a metaphor for disconnection in urban life. In the final sequence of Flight, Hou makes explicit the notion that each shot should be considered as a painting.

And just as Café Lumière was conceived as an homage to Ozu’s Tokyo Story, Flight updates The Red Balloon, Albert Lamorisse’s classic children’s movie. (It was partially funded by the Musée d’Orsay, which approached Hou about collaborating on a film.) The iconic balloon appears as a motif, but Hou is less interested in fantasy than in contrasting it with the grind of daily life. Indeed, the movie may be the first love poem to Paris set largely inside an apartment. The dialogue was improvised; Hou has said Binoche had some difficulty with the process, but that on her third day of rehearsal she arrived as her character, Suzanne.

“That’s his perspective—I didn’t feel that,” Binoche says when asked about the quote. “I felt like I was just taking his ideas and his perceptions about how he wanted the film to be. But he wasn’t sure himself. He was walking towards the film as I was walking towards the film.… And I chose to be that frenetic, somehow. Does it work, frenetic? Frénétique we say in French.”

Yes, frenetic. Suzanne is the most animated and memorable character in any Hou film. To the extent that Flight has a story, it involves Suzanne’s struggles to juggle work with the eviction of a bothersome tenant and her ongoing efforts to reach an understanding with her ex-boyfriend, now working on a book in Montreal. Her ordeal is observed by her young son (Simon Iteanu) and a visiting Beijing film student (Song Fang), who works as the son’s baby-sitter and casts him in her own Red Balloon homage.

Binoche says her performance was influenced by an actress-director team that might well be Hou’s opposite. “I was inspired by Gena Rowlands quite a lot—you know, some of Cassavetes’s films—because she has this inside layer,” Binoche says. Suzanne is “trying to be the good mother, and yet the insanity is taking over because she is trying to survive.”

The actress credits the atmosphere on the film set—and specifically the technicians, who she feels tend to be under-recognized—with giving her the freedom to create such an energetic character with a minimal story. “There was no dialogue,” she says. “There was no indication of sitting here or going there. It was all free. And the [cinematographer] had the same situation. He could shoot whatever he wanted to shoot.”

At a postscreening Q&A, she described the experience of making the movie as “life changing.” She didn’t mean it changed her outlook on life, but on acting. “It’s a fearless feeling,” she told us. “The fact that you have to jump off the cliff.… You have to be your own creator.”

Flight of the Red Balloon opens April 18 at the Music Box.

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