A mysterious red balloon affectionately follows seven-year-old Simon around Paris. Meanwhile his mother Suzanne, a puppeteer, uses her vocal talents to bring life to the shows she writes. Busy with a new show, single mother Suzanne becomes more and more distressed by complications that are taking over her personal life. Suzanne decides to hire Song, a Taiwanese film student to help care for Simon as she tries to get a grip on her problems...

Flight of the Red Balloon (Le Voyage du Ballon Rouge) pays homage to Albert Lamorisse's original 1956 short film The Red Balloon (Le Ballon Rouge). To be perfectly honest I can't fathom why on earth director Hou Hsiao Hsien wanted to pay homage to the original in the first place. Could it be that this was the only way he could think of breaking out of the Asian art house scene?

To be perfectly honest, this movie only works because a red balloon is seen at the beginning and end of the movie. It's hardly featured at all anywhere else - which sort of fails to live up to the promise that the balloon follows Simon around Paris.

While we don't seen the balloon much, at every opportunity the director shoves red balloons down our throat in case we've forgotten that he's paying homage to the original movie: Song is in France to film a student movie about a red balloon floating around in Paris; there is a painting on the side of a building that shows a red balloon floating in the sky; and on a school trip the children look at a picture of a child whom appears to be looking at a red balloon.

In truth, this is just an average movie that includes images of a balloon in a poor attempt to jump on the back of Lamorisse's original classic - Hsien should be be ashamed of himself.

I'm assuming that this movie was largely improvised - the scenes are long, one-take affairs which never seem staged. But a good 30 minutes could easily have been shaved off the running time (hell, this could have said everything it needed to in 30 minutes) and the experience would have been a lot more palatable.

The only extra is the trailer.

This is too long, too dull and left me deflated.

3

Nick Smithson