DVDs of the Week – ‘Flight of the Red Balloon’ and ‘Stuck’ – October 21, 2008
As the art house industry of foreign films and genuine American indies is being chipped away by the so-called Hollywood Indies of the studio boutique divisions and explosion of successful documentaries, DVD has been the place for film fans to turn for the kinds of films that are disappearing from the theaters. Here are a couple that deserve a look.
The shadow of Albert Lamorisse’s 1956 fantasy The Red Balloon hovers over Hou Hsiao-hsien’s lovely drama Flight of the Red Balloon. The magical balloon with a mind and a heart of its own tags along after a young boy (Simon Iteanu), placidly and wistfully looking in on the gentle child and his nanny (Fang Song), a Chinese film student, while its image is echoed in paintings and other references during Hou’s lovely tour of Paris. At the center of the film is single mother (Juliette Binoche), a puppet theater artist pulled apart emotionally by an absent boyfriend and a deadbeat tenant while trying to stage a new production. Her life is as cluttered as her loft apartment, yet even at wit’s end and artfully disheveled under a tangle of blonde hair, Binoche glows. It only makes her distress more painful.
Hou’s first film made outside of Asia is his most emotionally turbulent, yet he remains, like the balloon, outside looking in, a compassionate but distant observer capturing it all with a graceful restraint and floating beauty that ultimately carried me away with it.
Stuart Gordon made his reputation bring H.P. Lovecraft to the screen with a mix of creative metaphysics, kinky sex and gorey black humor (see Re-Animator and From Beyond) and has had a hard time getting people to notice that there’s another side – in fact many other sides – to the director. After bringing David Mamet’s misanthropic Edmund to the screen in 2005, he turns a true story into the unfairly neglected drama Stuck:
“It’s not my fault,” whines Brandi Boski (Mena Suvari), a caregiver at a nursing home whose hit and run results in a homeless man (Stephen Rea) stuck in her windshield. She hides the crime – and the dying man – in her garage, waiting for him to die and the problem to go away. Inspired by a true incident, it’s a lacerating portrait of an otherwise generous human who turns herself into the victim to justify her heartless actions.
