I watched this movie totally by surprise. I found out just one hour before that it was scheduled on TV.
It started slowly, maybe too slowly, or maybe too arid, for my taste, to become suddenly so cute, and not only cute, everything on the screen was real time, I was following breathlessly the adventures of the little girl, to find out, exactly at the end, that the movie was about something else.
The White Balloon - you get the meaning of the title only in the last scene, after all movie was about getting the money, loosing and then trying to recuperate them to buy a goldfish.
This movie is not only deceptive, it has multiple levels of deception.
The author of the screenplay is Abbas Kiarostami, and the way it starts looks like a movie by Kiarostami about children (along with grown-ups not understanding the little ones). Where is the Friend's Home comes to mind immediately, only this is beguiling. Here the grown-ups, as estranged from the natural of children as they can be, are eventually willing to help.
Also the little girl is not faultless either. Actually she is a pest. Anything bad that comes is due to her only. She is greedy, cunning, desperate, spoiled. That's it. While she is cute. Well, because all kids her age are the same way: greedy, cunning, selfish, desperate, spoiled; a pest, while extremely cute. That's why we love them.
Is it then a nice comedy about a cute girl who desires a goldfish? Not exactly, that's just another level of deception.
As it comes to the end, we realize the remarkable wholeness of this movie: a close space, just a couple of streets, a very short period of time, just a couple of hours, just a few personages, confined to this small space and time. Each one (not only the girl) is acting somehow frenetically, and the resulting whole is a crazy small universe, absurdly self-sufficient.
These people are acting totally unaware of each other, except when it happens to collide; in these particular situations they fight or cooperate, or do the both, then again each one is unaware of others' presence.
There is however a boy who's the exception, a stranger (an Afghan immigrant)... but you should watch the movie to get it.
