'The Red Balloon' | Critics' Picks | The New York Times

 

The Red Balloon (French: Le ballon rouge) is a 1956 French fantasy comedy-drama featurette written, produced and directed by Albert Lamorisse. The 34-minute short, which follows the adventures of a young boy and a sentient, mute red balloon, was filmed in the Ménilmontant neighborhood of Paris.

 

Pascal Lamorisse, a young boy, discovers a large, helium-filled red balloon on his way to school one morning. As he plays with it, he realizes that the balloon has a mind of its own. The balloon begins to follow him wherever he goes, never straying far, and sometimes floating outside his apartment window as his mother will not allow it inside. As Pascal and the balloon wander through the streets of Paris, they draw attention and envy from other children. At one point, the balloon enters his classroom, causing an uproar among his classmates and alerting the principal, who locks Pascal in his office. Later, after being freed, Pascal and the balloon encounter a young girl with a blue balloon that also seems to have a mind of its own.

 

One Sunday, Pascal is told to leave the balloon at home while he and his mother attend church. However, the balloon follows them through an open window and into the church, where a scolding beadle leads them out of the building. As Pascal and the balloon continue to explore the neighborhood, a gang of older boys, envious of the balloon, steal it while Pascal is inside a bakery. He retrieves it, but the boys chase him through narrow alleys. They hold Pascal back as they fell the balloon with slingshots and stones before one boy finally destroys it by stomping on it.

 

All of the other balloons in Paris come to Pascal's aid, lifting him aloft for a cluster balloon ride over the city.

 

The film serves as a visual record of the Belleville and Ménilmontant areas of Paris, which had fallen into decay by the 1960s. This decline led the Parisian government to demolish much of the area as part of a slum-clearance effort. While some of the site was rebuilt with housing projects, the rest remained wasteland for 20 years. Many of the locations featured in the film no longer exist, including one of the bakeries, the school, the famous staircase located just beyond the equally famous café Au Repos de la Montagne, the steep steps of passage Julien Lacroix where Pascal finds the balloon and the empty lot where many of the battles take place. Today, the Parc de Belleville stands in that area. However, some locations remain intact, such as the apartment where Pascal lives with his mother at 15 Rue du Transvaal, the Église Notre-Dame-de-la-Croix de Ménilmontant and the Pyrénées-Ménilmontant bus stop at the intersection of Rue des Pyrénées and Rue de Ménilmontant.

 

 

Since its first release in 1956, the film has generally received overwhelmingly favorable reviews from critics. Bosley Crowther of The New York Times hailed the simple tale and praised director Lamorisse, writing: "Yet with the sensitive cooperation of his own beguiling son and with the gray-blue atmosphere of an old Paris quarter as the background for the shiny balloon, he has got here a tender, humorous drama of the ingenuousness of a child and, indeed, a poignant symbolization of dreams and the cruelty of those who puncture them."

 

When the film was re-released in the United States in late 2006 by Janus Films, Entertainment Weekly magazine film critic Owen Gleiberman praised its direction and simple story line that reminded him of his youth, and wrote: "More than any other children's film, The Red Balloon turns me into a kid again whenever I see it...[to] see The Red Balloon is to laugh, and cry, at the impossible joy of being a child again."

 

Film critic Brian Gibson wrote: "So far, this seems a post-Occupation France happy to forget the blood and death of Adolf Hitler's war a decade earlier. But soon people’s occasional, playful efforts to grab the floating, carefree balloon become grasping and destructive. In a gorgeous sequence, light streaming down alleys as children's shoes clack and clatter on the cobblestones, the balloon bouncing between the walls, Pascal is hunted down for his floating pet. Its ballooning sense of hope and freedom is deflated by a fierce, squabbling mass. Then, fortunately, it floats off, with the breeze of magic-realism, into a feeling of escape and peace, The Red Balloon taking hold of Pascal, lifting him out of this rigid, petty, earthbound life."

 

In a review in The Washington Post, critic Philip Kennicott had a cynical view: "[The film takes] place in a world of lies. Innocent lies? Not necessarily. The Red Balloon may be the most seamless fusion of capitalism and Christianity ever put on film. A young boy invests in a red balloon the love of which places him on the outside of society. The balloon is hunted down and killed on a barren hilltop—think Calvary—by a mob of cruel boys. The ending, a bizarre emotional sucker punch, is straight out of the New Testament. Thus is investment rewarded—with Christian transcendence or, at least, an old-fashioned Assumption. This might be sweet. Or it might be a very cynical reduction of the primary impulse to religious faith."

 

The review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes reported that 95% of critics gave the film a positive review, based on twenty reviews. The critical consensus reads: "The Red Balloon invests the simplest of narratives with spectacular visual inventiveness, making for a singularly wondrous portrait of innocence."