Hou Hsiao-Hsien’s Le Voyage du ballon rouge is lovely but disappointing, mostly because Hou, acclaimed director of Café Lumière and Three Times, refuses to give his premise the narrative rhythm and framework it so keenly deserves. Hou’s first feature in French, the film is a loose remake of Albert Lamorisse’s classic 1956 short, Le Ballon rouge, and looks at Song (Song Fang), a diffident Taiwanese film student who is nanny to harried actress Suzanne’s (Juliet Binoche) son Simon (Simon Iteanu). Binoche is incredible, and Hou leaves it up to her to push the action forward: her sparring with a deadbeat tenant (Hippolyte Girardot) seems a troubling symptom of all the film’s characters’ insecurities. But with Song and Simon, Hou attempts lyricism only, pulling out the device of the red balloon (which follows both around Paris) with opaque intent. Does it represent Song’s otherness and its attendant voyeurism? Is its colour evocative of China? Is it still, as in Lamorisse’s film, an embodiment of innocence? The lack of precision, rather than attaining a sort of shimmering ambiguity, is annoying, even pretentious—and ends up subsuming Suzanne’s much more potent, much more thematically coherent drama. (DB)