Balloon puts a Tibetan family in a birth-control bind

► Balloon is in UK cinemas from 24 September.

There’s no doubt that Tibetan director-novelist Pema Tseden is one of the finest filmmakers now working, but it’s hard to discuss his cinema without going into fraught questions of politics. Balloon is an obvious case in point. The film is set in the early 1980s, when China’s communist government was imposing stringent birth-control policies on the whole nation: single kids for Han Chinese, up to three for ethnic minorities. The central characters are three generations of a sheep-farming family on the vast plains of Qinghai: Dargye and his wife Drolkar already have three children (all sons, the eldest at school) and they live with his elderly father, a devout Buddhist. Dargye is an alpha male with robust sexual appetites; Drolkar wants no more children, less because of government rules than because her trusted woman doctor Druktso tells her that the financial and practical demands of big families belong in the past. The family is always strapped for cash; Dargye must sell a sheep every time his son’s school fees fall due. The conundrum at the core of the story is simple but piercing. Grandpa dies, Drolkar falls pregnant before she can be sterilised, and Dargye and the eldest son Jamyang beg her not to abort the baby in the belief that it can be a reincarnation of Grandpa.

But Balloon is neither a protest against Chinese rule nor a sociological vignette of Tibetan life in the early 1980s. Like Pema Tseden’s other films, it’s acted in Tibetan and is rooted in frank observation of Tibetan realities – the emotional and sexual dynamics of family life on the plains, the growing gaps between generations, the ancient/modern dichotomies – and infused with both humour and sadness. It’s also shot through with dreams, because the magic-realist side of Pema Tseden keeps him alert to the Buddhist dimension of Tibetan life (even for the less observant younger people) and to the characters’ spiritual lives in general. The result covers much ground but is cleverly organised around the author’s way with themes, variations and sometimes uncanny correspondences.

The birth-control theme, for example, relates to both a general embarrassment in the community about sexual matters and a specific embarrassment about condoms. Doctor Druktso gives Drolkar a small supply of condoms (including one she was keeping for herself), but the two young kids find them hidden under their parents’ bedding and blow them up as balloons, trading one for a toy whistle – an innocent act which directly results in their mother’s pregnancy, not to mention Dargye being drawn into a brawl by a furious neighbour. The reticent Drolkar relies on her husband to reprimand the kids. But Dargye simply tells them not to do it again (of course, they do) and buys them off with the promise of real balloons next time he goes to market. This flow of incidents is not written or filmed as a series of dramatic ‘beats’. Pema Tseden is merely casually establishing why and how Drolkar gets pregnant again and equally casually observing patterns of male and female behaviour that will guide our understanding of all that follows.

He’s not yet done with the balloon motif either. (Both the Tibetan title Dbugs Lgang and the Chinese title Qiqiu do mean ‘balloon’.) The shift in Drolkar’s attitude to men is the ‘hidden’ theme in the second half of the film, and it’s decisively shaped by the visit of her sister Shangchu Drolma, a Buddhist nun. Drolma first appears when she stops at the Tibetan high school to escort Jamyang home at the end of term; she’s dismayed to discover that the boy’s language teacher is Takbum Gyal, a sad-eyed man she was once involved with. He gives her a copy of a novel he has written (called Balloon) and tells her it discusses how their relationship failed due to “misunderstandings”. (There is a real-life Tibetan writer of that name, whose stories Pema Tseden has translated into Chinese.) But when Drolkar finds out what the book is, she throws it on the fire; she blames the writer for ruining her sister’s life and driving her into Buddhist piety. Drolma, though, wants to read it and retrieves the singed copy from the flames. Drolkar coldly sends the writer packing when he comes looking for Drolma – it’s the only time she speaks angrily to a male – and the encounter steels her for the coming confrontation with her husband over her unwanted pregnancy.

Again, this schematic account of the film’s narrative line suggests that Pema Tseden is foregrounding a feminist take on a woman learning to assert herself. Far from it: the changes in Drolkar’s thinking are integrated into a much wider picture. It’s almost like a Frederick Wiseman documentary: the viewer is given uninflected, seemingly neutral information and allowed to draw her/his own conclusions. There is indeed an element of documentary in Pema Tseden’s mise en scène: Lu Songye’s cinematography is mostly handheld, and several significant conversations are only half glimpsed through doorways or window-frames. But the immediate inspiration for the storytelling strategies seems to be the later films by Hou Hsiao Hsien, similarly open-minded in their refusal to steer the viewer to obvious moral lessons: no surprise that two of Hou’s long-term collaborators – editor Liao Qingsong and sound designer Tu Duu Chih – turn up on the credits, or that the film’s transcendent ending is a beautiful homage to Hou’s Flight of the Red Balloon (2007).

A profile of Pema Tseden in the New York Times International Edition in 2019 quoted him as saying “Being an artist in the system in China is a difficult life. But freedom is a relative concept. And this is the land I belong to.” In addition to his writings and translations, he has kick-started an entire ethnic-Tibetan film culture: several former collaborators have become directors in their own right, and he is developing a stock company of excellent actors. Jinpa (who plays Dargye) has been a fixture in his recent films, and Sonam Wangmo (Drolkar) and Yangshik Tso (Drolma) have both played less ‘traditional’ women in Tharlo (2015) and Jinpa (2018). His work is a source for real optimism in modern film culture.