The horse and his boy

Having enjoyed The Red Balloon I naturally looked to see what else French filmmaker Albert Lamorisse had produced and so found Crin Blanc. I found this also to be a beautiful film even if the plot is a little dull. When I first wrote this post I included a link to the whole movie on YouTube but this has since been removed for copyright reasons. So instead here is a trailer for both films:

Although I didn't cry, this observation sums up my feelings: “Grown-ups, who know too well how fragile this beauty is, are likely to cry.” Terrence Rafferty, The New York Times

Some interesting background from here:

Though Alain Emery actually did his own bareback riding (a tremendous physical feat, considering he had to learn how to ride for the film), during the scene in which White Mane drags him violently, facedown, through the muddy marshes, the director himself doubled for the boy. Also, though the majestic stallion seems such a unique, commanding, and truly wild personality, he was in fact a necessary composite of several trained horses. It’s the sort of invisible magic that Lamorisse would become famous for with his creation of the illusion of a sentient helium balloon floating over Paris with teasing charm and surprising wit.

Also like in “The Red Balloon”, “White Mane” ends on a strikingly ambiguous note, launching its child protagonist off to an undetermined (and, in this case, even vaguely threatening) future. Whether that “wonderful place where men and horses are friends, always,” as the narrator intones, is on some magical island or in the cold depths of the sea is open to interpretation. But what’s definite is that Folco and White Mane’s final flight is a necessary escape from a world that Lamorisse has painted as irredeemably corrupt.

Lamorisse lived for 14 years after “The Red Balloon,” mostly making documentaries. While he was shooting what would be his last picture in Tehran in 1970, his helicopter crashed; he was 48. Even he might not have been capable of imagining a more fitting end: he rose to get a clearer, freer view of the world, and fell from the sky.

part 2