Dir. Yuzo Kawashima. 110 minutes.
3/5
In the decade following Japan’s “Pacific War,” Haruki (Masayuki Mori) has built a thriving camera company. While Haruki is able to balance business and family, his son Keikichi (Tatsuya Mihashi) has grown into an arrogant hedonist, tossing over one mistress for another. Haruki will see firsthand whether family and tradition will survive the emergence of Japan’s new capitalism.
Like seemingly all Japanese fiction of the past 150 years, “The Balloon” is a story of the old world colliding with the new. Director Yuzo Kawashima conveys this conflict not just through his characters’ words, but through their clothing, their homes — everything that makes up their day-to-day existence. Older characters’ drab kimonos and cloth-windowed houses are contrasted with the smart neckties and chromed automobiles of the young.
Viewers may derive some amusement from the fact that the film’s “seedy nightclub” looks pretty tidy and proper. This was a moment in history when a cocktail shaker and a bit of piano jazz was all it took to make a venue seriously disreputable. This kind of charming naïveté jostles uncomfortably with characters’ nihilistic jokes about the possibility of being wiped out by nuclear bombs. Shot cleanly and minimalistically, “The Balloon” offers a clear-eyed look at the hidden costs of Japan’s rapid transformation from a walled-off kingdom to a capitalist wonderland.
