You red that right

In the run-up to the quintessential red-white-blue holiday I got to thinking about the color red.

Everyone -- especially red-blooded Americans -- likes red.

Blue and white are very popular as well, but there is just something about red.

Decorators encourage homeowners to include a pop of red in every room.

Red cars cost more to insure. Just being red makes them appear faster.

Red roses are an archetype of everything achingly beautiful to be found in the world.

Where would we girls be without red nail polish? Not to mention lipstick.

Wear a red hat, ladies, and see if you don't get asked all sorts of ridiculous questions. Like: "Ooooh! Are you a member of the Red Hat Club?"

You mean the one synonymous with old and addlepated? NO.

Red delicious apples call your name in the produce section.

There's Johnny on the red carpet, clearly not far from Red Square.

And then there's that whole "lady in red" trope.

But I was thinking more in the abstract.

Specifically I was watching The Red Balloon for the umpteenth time on Netflix, and thinking about how much I like movies with red in the title.

The Red Shoes is both a classic and a perennial favorite.

Red River is my favorite Western, with the possible exception of High Noon (I have a thing for Gary Cooper) and Hondo ... I can see I'm in trouble so I'll stop there.

Ruggles of Red Gap. Simply hysterical.

Where the Red Fern Grows. Old Dan and Little Ann? Enough said.

But I want to talk about The Red Balloon, made in 1956 by Albert Lamorisse and starring his own son, Pascal Lamorisse.

It was released in the United States four days after I was born.

When I was a kid, my sister and I had the book The Red Balloon, which is basically the movie in book form rather than the other way around.

Pascal the impossibly cute Parisian child is on every page, either chasing or being led by the improbably plump and shiny red balloon he rescued from being tethered to a Paris lamppost.

I can still remember the smell of the pages of that book. To me it smelled like Paris.

Of all the movies I named above, The Red Balloon -- which with a thirty-four-minute runtime is a short rather than a feature film -- requires the most from the viewer in the way of suspended disbelief.

I mean, come on. A small child is led hither and yon by an impish red balloon, incurring the jealousy and murderous wrath of an ever-increasing number of gormless but mean neighborhood boys, who end up forming a gang bent on destroying the balloon.

And they succeed.

But as the red balloon withers and wrinkles and loses altitude only to be stomped flat by the meanest boy, something miraculous happens.

Balloons of every color, all with long leads, leap from the fingers of children all over Paris.

They escape from balloon vendors and march single-file down the rues of the romantic city.

They float purposefully from windows and congregate like parti-colored caviar in the French sky.

Bleu, blanc, rouge ... plus yellow, green, pink, and orange.

They find a dejected Pascal mourning the death of his special spherical friend.

He immediately brightens and begins gathering the patiently hovering balloons by their long strings.

When he has enough strings clutched in his tiny fists, the camera pans out and Pascal -- clearly seated in a cleverly concealed harness of some sort -- is lifted up and away from the corpse of his balloon and the dirt of hatred in which it lies.

The next -- long, final -- shot is of a figure that is supposed to be Pascal aloft and sailing -- as opposed to drifting --through the beautiful air over Paris.

When I say "supposed to be Pascal" it is with a bit of a snark-sneer because this time when I watched The Red Balloon, I was struck forcefully by the height of the individual used in that shot.

I realize Albert Lamorisse would not have put his very-young son Pascal into a harness of any kind and allowed him to be dragged a fourth of a mile up into the sky. Any sky, French or not.

So I know it's a stuntperson in that final shot and I know why it had to be a stuntperson.

But did it have to be such an obviously full-grown adult stuntperson? Are we to believe that in all of 1956 France, Lamorisse could not find an unusually short stuntperson to play five-year-old Pascal from a distance?

Because when the suspended disbelief falls to the dirt just like the unfortunate red balloon, you are staring at the legs hanging down from that invisible harness, and they look longer than Pascal's entire body.

And once you see it, you cannot for all the croissants in France unsee it.

For a few moments it had me seeing red.

Then I recovered. Je n'y peux rien. C'est la vie.

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Happy Friday ~ Happy Weekend

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Comments

[Mari]

You have a knack for pulling seemingly unrelated pictures and pulling them all together with your post. I really enjoyed this - and the pictures, but can you believe that I've never seen The Red Balloon?

[irene]

I've never seen, nor read the Red Balloon, and cried all too hard at Where the Red Fern Grows, but I love your view, and I'll try not to look at the long legs dangling from the harness of the floating balloons.

[Skunkfeathers]

I looked around my apt and didn't really see much red at all...other than on my flag I have adorning my wall clock (a small American flag that flies proudly herein)...until I got to my bookshelf. All kinds of reds there.

Reckon that means I'm well red....