Magic Pumpkin

Stowaway in the Sky is a magic pumpkin coach ride over the city of Paris and the fair land of France. The pumpkin is a huge, orange-striped balloon. The low-level astronauts are a wispily bearded grandfather (Andre Gille) and his grandson, a mopheaded tyke named Pascal (Pascal Lamorisse). In this bucolic idyl of the air, the pair see the familiar through the fresh eye of wonder, which is one of the ways art invades the charmed realm of childhood.

Stowaway alternately celebrates the simple glories of nature and the complex architectural beauties of civilization. The camera, which was operated from a helicopter, drifts with the lazy, errant grace of an autumn leaf and establishes a reflective Whitmanesque tempo ("I loaf and invite my soul") far from the madding pace of the earthbound. Over Paris, the balloon nuzzles the Eiffel Tower, down whose girders an elevator slowly crawls like an enormous drugged beetle. Skimming over the Loire valley, the balloonists spy Henry II's gift to his mistress, Diane de Poitiers, the breath-catching Renaissance chateau of Chenonceaux, white as a bridal veil, with its lacy arches anchored in the Cher River like, a sculptured corps de ballet.

To exquisite mutations of color, the country scenes in Stowaway add poetry of motion. A stag hunt becomes a counterpoint of racing rhythms: the lope of the deer, the scrambling lurches of the hounds, the even piston thrusts of the horses. Flocks of flamingos lifting into flight bedazzle the surface of the water like a downpour of diamonds. A forest fire spills demonic red-orange flame over a hillside as if the Devil were painting his own authoritative version of the Inferno.

These natural splendors are strung on a spindly and sometimes travelogy narrative, supplied by S. N. Behrman and unobtrusively spoken by Jack Lemmon (who has launched his own Jalem Productions by bringing the film to the U.S.). It is difficult to decide whether a clownish mechanic named Tou-Tou (Maurice Baquet), who trails the balloonists in a vintage auto, is a comic relief or a sobering burden. There is a hoked-up scare finale where the balloon threatens to run away with the boy. But in the main, French Moviemaker Albert Lamorisse (Pascal's real-life father) fills the screen with the vibrant reality that once moved Gerard Manley Hopkins to write:

The world is charged with the grandeur of God. It will flame out, like shining from shook foil.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.