Flight of the Red Balloon (2007)

I love this movie so much

Sadly Over-hyped

This film is so real. It treats its characters with so much care and sensitivity.

Through painfully honest and emotional moments, the movie becomes irresistibly relatable

get real. how could you take a cute, lively, colorful little children's film gem and extract something so talky, tedious, pretentious and dreary out of it? well they did and it doesn't work.i mean this movie really stunk. i grew up watching the original 'Red Balloon' and i always loved and enjoyed it. especially when i was very little i was delighted by it and i remember it being one of the first movies i ever cried during (the other was 'Snow White', but i think i was crying because i was scared sh--less). the original balloon was a sensitive, lovely little film with a timely message. not 'Flight'. it's just a big pretentious dud full of hot air and a message that is overly complicated and lost. that's NOT 'The Red Balloon'.how can you take a film that has such wonderful simplicity and turn it into something so unnecessarily complicated? as far as film making goes 'Flight' misses the point of the original's approach. the original film was told visually and with no real dialogue. this film was so dialogue driven and full of talk that i became glassy-eyed and detached. no real feeling here at all. you shouldn't make 'The Red Ballon' so cerebral. it loses all impact.i wish i could say i fell asleep during this, but i sat through the whole boring thing until the end. whatever message this film is supposed to have just got lost in all the talky tedium. yeeesh! it's supposed to based on a kid's classic. lighten up.

Flight of the Red Balloon may be the most mundane movie I've ever seen. This is one of those slice-of-life movies in which there is no strong story line to move things forward. Most of the movie is about ordinary, everyday events that have only the barest hint of drama. In one typical scene, the characters spend several minutes discussing how many pancakes they want to eat. Like the Seinfeld TV show, this is a movie about nothing, but it lacks Seinfeld's witty, intelligent dialog. What the characters say here is just as mundane as what they do. These ordinary scenes drag on forever too. If the director had edited the movie down to maybe 45 minutes, the result might have been pleasant and mildly-entertaining. But as it stands, you can hardly stay awake to watch. Granted, the actors are good, but sadly they don't have much material to work with. And by the way, the director's use of the red balloon makes no sense. The balloon (inexplicably) follows the boy around in the beginning and the end of the movie. But in between, the balloon is nowhere to be seen except, paradoxically, in a few brief scenes as a prop in the nanny's home movie. The red balloon almost appears to have been added as an afterthought, to pay homage to the classic 1956 movie, The Red Balloon.

I had a sinking feeling when going to see this film because I'm old enough to remember the 1956 Red Balloon, which I hated like poison, despite the critical acclaim of the day.The redeeming features of this Hsiao-hsien Hou film are an inspired performance from Juliette Binoche, as a harassed, over-worked single mother, struggling with her career as an artist as well as trying to bring up her young son - beautifully and naturally portrayed with lots of obviously ad lib lines and actions skillfully preserved.The grimy and claustrophobic photography of Paris - without the glamour - was inspiring, too, and apt for the film's theme. At times, there were sequences so languidly beautiful that one could forget the rest of the film and just enjoy the pictures.But more merit than that was difficult to find. There was plenty of drama but no plot; no clear protagonist; an apparent total lack of direction; characterisation so diffuse that it was difficult to know - or want to know - much about anyone. After an hour, I still had no feeling for, or interest in any of the main characters, all of whom seemed to behave as childishly as the little boy. The Chinese girl, employed as a nanny said and did little, and it was difficult to understand why she was there at all, unless she found the French psyche as impenetrable as we did in the audience.I suppose Jean Luc-Godard was responsible for starting the trend for aimless, directionless, plot less, pointless, self-indulgent French cinema style with his 'classic' A Bout de Soufflé. I watched the audience for a lot of the time, since the film was so boring, and discovered that most were fidgeting and looking around the theatre as I was. And yet as we left, no one dared to say an adverse word. It's ART, I suppose, and therefore one must not mock! But it's worth remembering that even Shakespeare wrote some absolute turkeys. There, I've said it!

I was bitterly disappointed in this movie which had gotten a glowing review from one source I read but I should have paid more attention to the negative reviews on this board. The device of the freely floating and very large red balloon is at first charming, then aggravating and finally maddening! Most of the camera shots were very close in close and claustrophobic situations. Suzannes apartment, the streets of her neighborhood, the visits to her puppet theatre. Suzanne (Juliette Binoche) is one of those frazzled people who is yet canny and shrewd and not so really out of control as you would think from the condition of her apartment and her activities. She is a loving but remote mother to her 6 or 7 yr old son, Simon. The nanny, Song is properly attentive to her charge but obviously more interested in her film career. There is Simon's absent older "sister" (Is it she we see in the scenes with Simon and a Suzanne with a different hairdo?) She lives in Brussels with her grandfather. We don't know why. Marc and his girlfriend are tenants of Suzannes but don't pay rent and use her kitchen. Simon takes piano lessons in a piano in Marc's apt. Suzanne has the piano moved upstairs and we hear a long description of injuries one can receive from moving such things. We go on a train ride. There were three things I found of interest in this movie. 1) you use green rather than blue for erasing on a computer. 2) the teacher with the children in the museum was interesting. Can't remember the third so I guess it wasn't so interesting after all. I gave it 2 stars because all of the actors were good, but it may have been hard to tell. This was so bad I was praying for it to end and I am an atheist.