Adapting Impressionism: Hou Hsiao-hsien’s Le Voyage du ballon rouge

Abstract

The 2007 release of a film directly inspired by a beloved French children’s movie made fifty years earlier would have been surprising enough without the additional fact that the adaptation was the work of a Taiwanese filmmaker who had never before filmed outside Asia and who spoke no French. Hou hsiao-hsien’s Le Voyage du ballon rouge is not only a startling original film in its own right but it is also richly illustrative of the value of broadening our understanding of the intricate dialogic relations among texts. Hou’s reinterpretation of Lamorisse’s film intersects not only with his own recurrent stylistic preferences and prior work as a filmmaker but also with a variety of self-reflective art works ranging from Chinese puppet shows to the statues in the Luxembourg garden to scenes from an internal remake of Le Ballon rouge to a visit to the Musee d’Orsay to see Felix Vallotton’s “Le Ballon.” In keeping with the extraordinary focus within the film on lighting and the color red, Hou’s homage to Lamorisse is all about allusion, reflections, and impressions. Appropriately, one of the works it evokes is the Claude Monet painting, “Impression, soleil levant,” whose reddish sun looks strikingly like a red balloon floating through the sky and whose title named a movement which has not only endured but expanded to include analogous styles in a variety of visual arts and other media.