How the first movie Michel Gondry ever saw shaped his career
Michel Gondry is a director whose play lies in imaginative leaps.
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind might be his most famous work, but throughout the gamut of his releases, he revels in equally masterful blending of science fiction and fantasy, ushered by genuine human emotion to encompass a unique creative middle ground that feels like a bedtime fable. Unsurprisingly, the film that put Gondry firmly on the path to melding stop motion with live-action is an equally imaginative anomaly.
He credits the inventive and one of Akira Kurosawa’s favourite French features, Le Voyage en Ballon (Stowaway in the Sky in English), which he saw as a child, with shaping his career vision. A slice-of-life from 1960, director Albert Lamorisse made Le Voyage en Ballon following the success of his Oscar award-winning short Le Ballon Rouge (The Red Balloon) in 1956.
While the short followed the adventures of an almost sentient balloon held onto by a school-going boy over the course of his usual day, the feature follows the adventures of curious young Pascal, played by the director’s son, who sneaks onto his grandfather’s hot-air balloon, embarking on a journey traversing Brittany, Normandy and even the French Alps and meeting bewildered people on the way.
The film left a huge impression on young Gondry, who has been trying to bottle its dreamlike quality for his work ever since. “When you’re young, you’re very receptive to all the stuff you see, the emotions,” he reflected, “And then you try all the time to match up with those sensations. I’m always trying to re-create this feeling of watching this movie.”
The film’s layered message is also carried into Gondry’s films. In Le Voyage en Ballon, the endless possibilities, excitement and romanticism of balloon travel eventually wear off, as Pascal and his grandfather navigate church spires, factory smokestacks and the washing on a clothesline, in the process of staging their homecoming. It represents the naivety of our imaginations and how they can deceive us into thinking the grass could always be greener, until faced with the horizon of the residuals of curiosity.
In Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Gondry captures the romanticism of wanting memory erasure to forget an ex and the subsequent rationalisation of entering something doomed to fail through a non-linear narrative. He plays with the power of nostalgia and love, and the depth of heartache that leads one to blur the lines between reality and the ideal.
Le Voyage en Ballon was not shot in a studio but crafted from the environment out in the open. Lamorisse, who was a helicopter operator, actually hung a basket under a helicopter, pioneering a camera kit that would allow him to shoot the scenes from above, a possible precursor of drone shots. The crew had to battle the natural elements to capture shots only in good weather. Moreover, as a hot-air balloon is silent save the sound of the flame gassing it, a lot of the sound had to be dubbed in post, offering the film its ultimate surreal quality, something that Gondry has been chasing since.
Today, special effects are so advanced that all this can be recreated in a studio, but the skill involved in shooting Le Voyage en Ballon was unprecedented at the time. Lamorisse was later killed in a helicopter crash while filming the documentary Le Vent des Amoureux (The Lover’s Wind), and Pascal and his mother ended up completing the film, with the former now overseeing his father’s film company and the restoration of his shorts.
Gondry even channelled Lamorisse’s risky filming techniques in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, getting his crew to build a house that would wash away on the beach for a pivotal scene. The special crew hired to place the set in the water allegedly refused due to the dangers, leading to them being replaced with his production team, the actors, and the producers. It’s hard to imagine a film pulling a stronger impact on a director who has evidently endeavoured to capture the essence of Lamorrise in everything from content and style to technique.
