It’s all palm trees, white sand beaches and other sun-kissed pleasures of nature in the traveler’s vision of Hawaii, but here on Bethel Street in downtown Honolulu there’s nothing but the chaos of the man-made world, as cars circle endlessly for parking, police sirens echo overhead, and about 1200 people jostle one another in disorganized lines as they wait for the beginning of this year’s Hawaii International Film Festival (HIFF).

Once inside the opulent Hawaii Theatre Center, a downtown landmark of art-deco flourishes and vigilant ushers, the crowd is given two greetings, one, the kind of thanks-for-coming, thanks-for-the-money-sponsors, it’s-the-best-year-evah -and-don’t-forget-to-vote-online hello you’d find at festivals world-wide, eloquently delivered by HIFF’s uber-suave Executive Director, CHUCK BOLLER, and another far more unusual greeting, a traditional Hawaiian blessing gorgeously chanted and vigorously stomped out onstage by a performer in native Hawaiian dress. Welcome to HIFF, indeed.

HIFF made a daring choice for its opening film, Taiwanese director HOU HSIAO-HSIEN’s Flight of the Red Balloon, filmed in Paris and an update of the classic 1959 French short work. Its cross-cultural background certainly matched the festival’s vision of itself as a place where “East Meets West,” to trot out a tired, but in this case quite fitting, phrase, and certainly the individuals involved, whether actress JULIETTE BINOCHE or director Hou, can be counted on to add a certain name recognition. But Hou’s moved far from the historical epics and Chinese chamber pieces of such beautifully photographed, fest-friendly realms of his earlier Flowers of Shanghai, The Puppetmaster or City of Sadness. Flight trades in sweeping historical backdrops, 1930’s costumes, and “exotic” locales and settings for a small tale of a young boy in Paris, his harried mother, and their new nanny (or “child-minder,” as the subtitles state) from China.

There’s a few shots of Paris by day, but most of the film takes place entirely in the cramped flat of the boy and his mother, a decision that certainly exacerbated the patience of most viewers expecting some exterior paens to postcard Parisian life. Other scenes find Hou’s camera fixated by reflections off of buses, or through windows, which promptly sent a few more viewers into a panic. Indeed, for most casual viewers, there are barely any traditionally “beautiful” images in the film. No exteriors of Paris’ glory, no pans through spacious, intricately lit rooms; it’s just the clutter of everyday life.

The question to ask, though, is why isn’t this accepted as “beautiful”? Hou’s proven that he can create a beautiful staged image; he’s one of the most visually talented directors of the past 20 years. But Hou here is following such artists as San Francisco-based Ernie Gehr, who also uses cinema the way a painter would, as a way to capture light and shadow as it exists in the modern world, i.e. off of buses, trains, and walls. Turning his camera on the everyday, on images as they reflect off a window, on light as it hits a wall, on the colors painted on a city bus, on the simple chaos of a living room floor, may wield even more beauty,and even some truth.

But try telling that to an opening night crowd. It’s a difficult work, especially for an opening-night crowd drawn more for the “festival” part, not the “film.” Quite a few were gone as as the film built to a conclusion, as Hou’s seemingly “going-nowhere” scenes and aesthetic experiments suddenly all added up to something. Near the end, a miraculous 15-minute take in the family’s apartment contained all the fury, emotion, and beauty that cinema aspire to.

HIFF, like most festivals, has always been caught between the auteurs and the populists. With their choice of Flight as the opening film, they went with the former. As the fest moves on through the week, though, there’s plenty of populist genre filmmaking to look forward to. We’ll see what happens next, and how the festival balances both sides of the equasion by the end. Thanks.