Flight of the Red Balloon film review

certificate_PG

FLIGHT OF THE RED BALLOON

The award for the most enervating film of the year must surely go to Flight of the Red Balloon, a ramshackle, deeply pretentious and completely self-indulgent project from Chinese director Hsiao-hsien Hou which is likely to send unsuspecting viewers into a cinematic coma.

It's meant, presumably, to be a homage to the classic 1956 Oscar-winning short The Red Balloon, a charming affair in which a young boy follows the titular balloon around the streets of Paris. Hou has updated it, trebled its length and squeezed any of the joie de vivre of the original out of it.

To be fair, there is some balloon action early on as a young lad does wander after said object through France's capital. He is accompanied and filmed by his nanny, a Chinese student making an art film while they wait for his mother (Juliette Binoche) to return from work.

Largely set in the family's small flat, Hou's camera is an observer to their day-to-day existence, as they argue with a neighbour, have piano lessons and have a new piano installed. The pace can best be described as funereal, with very little drama or indeed anything to evidently involve the viewer.

The most awkward sequences follow Binoche's character to her day job as a performer with a Chinese puppet theatre, but the tone of the film, which sometimes veers into pseudo-documentary territory, reveals little about its purpose. Obscure stuff, and likely to test the patience of even the most ardent world cinema fan.

Paul Hurley