I have just finished watching the movie “The Red Balloon” for the first time as an adult, and I can assure you that I have gained absolutely no more insight into it than I had as a child who was made to watch it time and time again at school. Every school seems to have a film that they showed on repeat, and “The Red Balloon” was ours.
Why is it that we were made to watch this little movie more than once? There was barely any dialogue and what there was, was in French. France French, not the Québécois which we would start to vaguely learn in 7th grade. Was it just that at 34 minutes in length, the teachers could shepherd several classes of kids into the gymnasium, start the film, and then duck out for a smoke and a couple hands of poker in the staff room without needing to check on us?
For those who have no ingrained knowledge of “The Red Balloon”, it was filmed in 1956 in what they crowed was Technicolor. However, the film, set and shot in post WWII Paris in one of the slummier neighbourhoods (soon to be razed as per the city’s rebuilding plan), was a wash of greys, blacks and rubble. The final scene took place in a vacant lot on the top of a knoll surrounded by ruins. Bleak. Not only was the scenery Technicolor-wasted, but all of the human characters featured in the film were dressed in a dreary array of greys, browns, blacks, and beiges. As if to hit the nail as squarely on the head as was cinematically possible, filmmaker Albert Lamorisse was able to find a source for the biggest, roundest, red-est balloon the theatre world had ever seen. The balloon character in the title role was as big as or bigger than its 5-year-old co-star, Pascal Lamorisse, who was the filmmaker’s own son.
The tale opens with young Pascal on his way to school wearing what looks like grey trackpants (tucked into the top of his socks for some reason), a matching grey turtleneck, and carrying a briefcase under his arm. He’s 5. What could possibly have been in the briefcase? He notices an enormous red balloon with an attached rope that looks heavy enough to hitch a horse to a post, entangled at the TOP of a streetlamp. He may be 5 but he amazingly hauls himself up the height of the streetlamp, unties the balloon, clenches the rope between his teeth, SLIDES back down the post, picks up his briefcase and walks off—balloon string still clamped in his mouth! I always felt that the movie could have been stopped right there—3:40 minutes in—and it would have received a standing O from any of the kids I viewed the movie with.
If you haven’t seen the film and intend to, know that I am going to just keep right on telling the film’s story, so you might want to look away.
Pascal comes to realize that this balloon has a mind of its own but is happy to follow Pascal around his neighbourhood and even play quietly by itself when the boy goes into class. The balloon’s antics astound and amuse all the kids in the neighbourhood and at school (why is Pascal sent to school in just his turtlenecked tracksuit and all the other kids wear overcoats and cute French hats?) but, as is the way among schoolboys, there is a faction of kids who want to steal and ultimately wreck Pascal’s balloon. Typical.
Balloon follows Pascal into church on Sunday morning and both get kicked out by what looks like a Beefeater, though I can’t imagine what a Beefeater would be doing manning the front door of a church. In France. Pascal runs off with Balloon while his maman is left to argue for lenience with the Beefeater.
Finally, the Mean Boys, whose ranks have swollen to include every ruffian and deviant kid in Paris, capture Balloon and as Pascal looks helplessly on, they scramble to destroy Balloon and for some reason each other (I don’t pretend to understand the motivation of boys). All Parisian boys have apparently been gifted with slingshots as babies and each boy takes his aim at Balloon when he’s not fighting off his own pals. Finally, one miscreant actually wings it.
The death scene of Balloon takes over a minute and we are forced to watch its slow loss of air until it has descended to the ground, a mere quarter of its original size. And in a stroke of impatience, shared by the audience, some jerk stamps on it and there is no question that the balloon is done.
Pascal is empty. We, the viewers, leave him sniveling in his misery and are instead treated to delightful scenes of similarly huge but variously coloured balloons being magically plucked away from children all throughout Paris. Innocent toddlers, babies in carriages, balloon vendors who depend on their sales to feed their families, all have their balloons suddenly and willfully take to the sky. The balloons take their sweet time flying themselves over to Pascal who is sitting pathetically beside his former prize, and they allow their ropes to be collected by the boy, who immediately forgets the shriveled carcass of his only friend lying nearby.
Eagerly and somewhat greedily, Pascal grabs all of the ropes and is lifted up into the air and transported over the chimney pots of Paris under a glorious bouquet of balloons.
Roll credits.
Back in the school gym, I’m sure that as the lights came up there were kids still rubbing their sleeves across their tear-stained faces even as our teachers (now smelling like whiskey and cheap cigars) came to collect us. As with a great number of things that happened to us when we were in grade school, I wonder about the motivation for the annual (some unfortunate years, biannual) viewing of this melancholic movie and question why there was never any in-class follow-up regarding what we’d seen. We were never asked to write even a quick summary of the movie in an attempt to veer the whole exercise back towards the fulfillment of any sort of educational goal.
The lasting takeaway for my generation was not from the film itself but was that if something gets hammered into you enough times, it will stay with you for years and years and years. Such was the far-reaching legacy of “The Red Balloon”. Well done, Emerson Haverly Public School.
By way of comparison, my parents’ generation memorized the poetry of Robert Frost, John Keats, and Robert Browning when they were in school. Just saying.
