This is gonna sound ridiculous (since I’m not a child anymore) but I don’t care.

I watched The Red Balloon (by Albert Lamorisse) for the first time last night. Maybe I should be sad that I never had a chance to watch as a child but my 9-year-old-self was happy with those thirty-four minutes of pure brilliance. 

It’s not a movie to watch with your reason, and I’m not the one with reason anyways, so my relation to Pascal (the little boy and director’s son) was of Love at First Sight! In fact, if I ever have a baby and it’s a boy I’m going to name it after Pascal (dear husband: we’ll discuss that later in life) inspired by the film’s desire for magic. 

Hours after the end I began into my own journey of finding its implications and meanings and why we are so damn cruel and destructive. I believe it’s a movie about our dreams and ways to find our escapes and paths for those dreams to grow stronger, but that it can be destroyed by an act of brutality (which in the movie as in reality It’s as simple as a child’s bullying another child). I’m glad I watched as an adult, but I’m also glad I haven’t lost my child-sense of looking at things for the first time.

Like poetry, we are left to fill in the blanks following this boy running across the beautiful streets of Paris and you (like Pascal) meet love, danger, mercy, life and death.

It’s perfection.