Title: Balloons
Director: Wan Ma Tse-dan
Starring: Solang Wangmu / Jimba / Yang Xiucuo
Release date: 2019
Douban score: 7.9 points
Director Wan Ma Tse-dan's new film "Balloon", based on his novel of the same name that won the Flower City Literary Award, shined in the horizon section of the Venice International Film Festival last year. Many expert professors and film critics believe that this is a work of the highest artistic standard for his film creation to date.
The balloon in the movie is a condom hidden under the pillows of Droga and Dajie in the 1990s, and the white balloon blown up when the two sons stole to play, and thus triggered a series of stories related to worldliness, religion, pregnancy, reincarnation, life or death.
If the white balloon (condom) is the wall that blocks life, then the red balloon (the child's novel plaything) contains a kind of enthusiasm and hope that attracts attention. The entire film is surrounded by these two colors (and of course there are many intermediate or transitional colors) and intertwines between the real world and religious beliefs, modern civilization and traditional culture, causing serious differences and internal conflicts.
Movies are not papers, and in the face of the same thing, "Balloons" is told with stories and visual pictures. It focuses on more general, broad and profound details, using red and white balloons as narrative incisions, reflecting the actual dilemmas of national policies, religious beliefs, and soul reincarnation in daily life.
The film's shaky shots, under a smooth and rough narrative, not only have a strong sense of presence, but also accurately express the collective anxiety, turbulent soul and inner world brought about by facing balloons on the wind-blown grassland.
The movie "Balloon" does not deliberately highlight the label culture of the "Tibetan nation". However, the Tibetans are a people with their own religious beliefs. "Balloon" is still a balloon (condom) as a clue, about the reincarnation of Tibetan souls, the inheritance of life, religion and secular life together with the story. Therefore, the core issue of its touch is the dual dilemma and conflict between faith and reality.
The whole film, based on the "balloon", a unique Tibetan image, as a clue, seems to be a simple plot, but in fact it is quite complicated. It takes the joys and sorrows of a Tibetan family as the traction, enters the individual marriage family of the Tibetan ethnic group, and depicts the diversity, complexity and contradiction of modern life faced by the Tibetan people through balloons (which can be understood as modern cultural concepts), cultural beliefs, fertility concepts, the cycle of birth and death, and the awakening of female consciousness, depicting the diversity, complexity and contradiction of modern life faced by the Tibetan people, and even the dilemma of the transformation of Tibetan modernity.
Although the process of modernity being influenced and infiltrated on the plateau continent has been relatively slow, more gentle and rainy, people must also face differences, conflicts, pains, troubles, and choices at the same time as they harvest new happiness and sweetness.
In the process of habituation and conversion, tearing apart daily life and firm order, suppressing desires and showing struggles, this film truly presents the life picture and changes of the times in the entire Tibetan area in the 1990s, giving us a variety of possibilities to face spiritual beliefs and real life. Perhaps, just like the red balloon that lifted into the air, it was like a warm and tender song of life, floating on the vast and distant grassland in the wind.