This is being touted as a remake of the masterly 1956 short The Red Balloon, which it isn’t – it’s actually more of a response to it. That’s probably just as well: 115 minutes of a kid wandering around with a balloon, as against the original 34 minutes, would be stretching the gentle lyricism a bit thin. Unfortunately Flight Of The Red Balloon is pretty slight and pointless anyway, though it’s reasonably well filmed and acted throughout. Juliette Binoche plays Suzanne, a Parisian puppeteer who writes and does all the voices (spoken or sung) in a Chinese puppet show. She has hired a Taiwanese experimental filmmaker called Song (Song Fang) to look after her seven-year-old son Simon (Simon Iteanu). Suzanne spends most of her waking life being rather stressed, whether from money hassles, the shortcomings of her downstairs tenant, or her absent daughter and boyfriend. Meanwhile, Simon potters around, and Song puts him in one of her short films. As you may have gathered, none of this is particularly dramatic, and though the level of tension increases marginally, the fascination doesn’t. The backdrops are easy on the eye, but the camera moves outdoors infrequently, and it’s all humdrum and low key without any redeeming compositional elegance or symmetry. The balloon motif pops in and out at random (in a gallery painting, in the film-within-a-film, or simply floating around Paris) and for no apparent symbolic purpose. This is the first in a series of films commissioned by the Musee D’Orsay, the only stipulation being that the museum must be present somewhere in the movie (another is Olivier Assayas’ superior Summer Hours). Perhaps they should have insisted on a plot too. Nothing much happens in this rather dreary but beautifully shot French drama, which could have used a much more cogent plot and sense of pacing.
Filmink 2.5/5
