Flight of the Red Balloon (2008)

Image credit: Tsai Cheng-Tai

FLIGHT OF THE RED BALLOON Song Fang (left) is the nanny caring for the son (Simon Iteanu) of a frazzled mom (Juliette Binoche, not pictured) in director Hou Hsiao-hsien's homage to a 1956 French classic

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The great Taiwanese filmmaker Hou Hsiao-hsien expands on the bright, drifty loveliness of Albert Lamorisse's 1956 classic, The Red Balloon, in Flight of the Red Balloon, his lyrical French-language debut, floating notions about loneliness and urban beauty, frazzled adults and buffeted kids. Her hair a telling botch of bleach, Juliette Binoche is outstanding as a wildly untogether single mother who parks her son with a French-speaking Chinese nanny while she whirls and worries. Hou, meanwhile, observes the mess in with a kind, gentle eye in much the same way as the red balloon hovers, patient. A-