Bittersweet endings aren’t in fashion these days.  Obama is going to win.  Israel must change.  GM will be reborn.  The economy is fundamentally sound.  America does not torture.  Two shorts from the 1950’s by French filmmaker Albert Lamorisse, listed by Netflix as local favorites in Brooklyn, provide a welcome respite from today’s perennial certainty and optimism.

The Red Balloon and White Mane are dark parables disguised as stories for children.  And the two have some moralistic similarities.  The Red Balloon is the story of love between a young boy and a balloon.  White Mane is the story of love between a young boy and a wild horse.

Disclaimer: What I have to say is, as always, very interesting.  And you may feel compelled to finish reading.  But I will disclose details of each film’s ending.  Such is the bittersweet reality of this post.  Whether you choose to engage is something I cannot control.

The Red Balloon goes like this: a young boy comes across an attractive big red balloon on the way to school one day in Paris.  The red balloon is tied to a lamp post, and the film does not explain whether the balloon has been abandoned or whether the boy simply steals it.  The balloon seems perfectly happy to devote itself to its new owner, following the young boy around like a dependent animal whether or not pulled by its string. The young boy and the balloon play cute games with each other and become inseparable.

When the boy arrives at school, he asks a retarded old man loitering in the boys’ school yard to hold the balloon while he is in class.   All other adults in the film are either irritated or totally impervious to the balloon’s remarkable sentience.  After school, the child and ripe red balloon then go for a walk.

Somewhere along their travels, boy and balloon begin to be hunted by savage kids who inexplicably want to capture boy and balloon and do terrible things to them.  Hunting like a pack, they succeed in capturing the balloon, begin molesting it, but the boy is able with luck to set it free.  Relentless in their pursuit, the pack of kids again capture both boy and balloon, and succeed in molesting the boy and puncturing the balloon.  We watch as the balloon, with resignation to its fate, slowly deflates and falls cold and shriveled silently to the ground.

The boy, beaten and broken, is stricken with despair for a half-second, until a swarm of balloons arrives and whisks him up and away into the air.  He floats above the city, ecstatic and full of life, having apparently forgotten his recently deceased best friend rotting in an abandoned lot down below.  The End.

Similarly, White Mane begins with a beautiful wild horse hunted by swarthy French gauchos.  They want to capture it and do who knows what to it, but the horse is wily and eludes its predators.  And while the young boy’s adoration of the horse seems at first to be innocent, he soon lures the horse towards him and savagely lunges at it with a lasso, exposing his true intentions.  The horse drags the boy around like a young Indiana Jones for a while until they both tire.  When the horse finally glances demurely over its shoulder and the two exchange exhausted looks into each other’s eyes, they fall in love.

The boy ties his beloved horse up in his backyard, along with his existing animal collection: a domesticated flamingo and harassed turtle.   Boy and horse have but a brief moment of domestic bliss before the horse becomes impatient and dissatisfied.  It hears its equine friends neighing out in the field, having just been captured by the gauchos.  The narrator informs us that the restless horse would rather return to its friends than continue living an idle domestic life with the boy. So the horse breaks free, runs to its friends, and is captured by the gauchos.

Once penned in by the gauchos, the horse changes its mind and breaks free again.  The gauchos, relentless in their pursuit, like the children in The Red Balloon, encircle the horse and light fire to the grass surrounding it in order to smoke it out.  The boy, obsessed by the horse despite his rejection, rushes to the horse’s defense and leads it through the fire towards a river.  Boy and horse begin swimming together out into the river.

The gauchos beg the boy to return to land.  They insist that he can keep the horse rather than kill himself rushing out into the river’s deadly currents.  But boy and horse obstinately continue.  The narrator informs us ominously that horse and boy reach a place where horses and men live together in peace.  The End.

The moral of these movies seems as clear as a sunny day. Perfect for the next crop of children who suffer our generation’s groundless optimism.  Happiness is fleeting.  The world is an awful place.  Love is easily spurned in favor of the next best thing.  People are savages.  True happiness is found only through death.

The filmmaker, who died prematurely in a helicopter crash while filming a movie aptly entitled The Lovers’ Wind, is also the inventor of the board game Risk.