Flight of the Red Balloon	by George Sax

It doesn’t come as much of a surprise when, after the finish of Hou Hsiao-hsien’s Flight of the Red Balloon, a few words of tribute to Albert Lamorisse appear on-screen before the credits roll. Lamorisse’s 1955 short film The Red Balloon is a celebrated fantasy about imaginative and metaphorical escape from childhood loneliness and alienation.

Lamorisse aimed for a delicately crafted and seductive magic, and he achieved it. Hou has tried to create his own kind of magic, but he hasn’t succeeded. His film essentially imposes a fantastic device on an all-too-mundane and flatly rendered domestic melodrama. The result is something like having Alice and the rabbit she pursued down that famous hole land in a couple of episodes of a TV soap opera.

The balloon that intermittently hovers over the pedestrian domestic drama in Flight is noticed only by Simon (Simon Iteanu), the semi-cherubic young son of a single Parisian mother, Suzanne (Juliette Binoche). She’s a mildly scatty, distracted and sometimes embattled actress who hires a Chinese film student, Song (Song Fang), to take care of Simon while she works and tries to sort out the challenging details of her life.

We’re expected to watch and listen as Suzanne tries to contact her former lover Pierre in Montreal, attempts to evict a subletter in part of her apartment, and occasionally acts out her frustrations.

Binoche is persuasive, but that’s part of the problem: She becomes the focal point of the mostly tedious proceedings. Simon gets eclipsed and it’s hard to get a grip on his situation, let alone that weird balloon.

Hou, an internationally respected Taiwanese filmmaker whose French film debut this is, doesn’t lift Flight from its distancing tone by his repeated blunt allusions to Lamorisse’s classic, least of all when he has Song ask Simon if he’s ever seen that film or when she shoots him in scenes for her own movie about a boy and his balloon.

Hou has provided some handsomely evocative views of Paris’ off-the-trodden-path streets and vistas, but they’re not enough recompense for this ill-conceived and oddly uninvolving exercise.

—george sax