Balloon

The two little sons of the virile Tibetan shepherd Dargye (played with superbly gruff energy by Pema Tseden’s favourite actor Jinpa) and his wife Drolkar mistake their parents’ hidden condoms for balloons, with unexpectedly comic results. Animal potency parallels human desires: Dargye is searching for a suitable ram to impregnate his flock of ewes. Meanwhile, Drolkar’s sister, the enigmatic nun Shangchu Drolma, visits bearing romantic secrets of her own. Drolkar is an adept manager of her rambunctious children, her demanding husband, and her traumatized sister. When a family member suddenly dies, the urgent need to attend to their reincarnation threatens to tear the family apart.

Balloon is fascinated with ideas of potency, pregnancy, and the possibilities for women’s body autonomy in a patriarchal and traditional Tibetan family. Cinematographer Lü Songye’s spectacularly coloured compositions propel Pema Tseden’s vision in darker, mysterious directions. Captured in semi-realist, semi-hallucinatory style, the dead, the reincarnated, and the living interweave ambiguously in this spiritual world where the stakes can’t be higher.

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