2007. Dir: Hou Hsiao-Hsien.
"From its distance, Hou’s camera shows a long and wide view, panning when needed but maintaining its original placement. Rather than motionless landscapes, his shots are like eyes gazing intently at a painting, seeing it in full yet scanning across the canvas to the forms within. The final scene of his most recent (and most mobile) film, Flight of the Red Balloon, literalizes this, his camera roving within Félix Vallotton's disquieting painting “The Ball” to contemplate a young boy scampering, a red ball looming, and ambiguous forms huddling. Overheard are school kids talking about the painting, their free-flowing conjectures synchronized with the camera’s movement, eyes and imaginations unbound despite the fact of the frame."
"Introduced enacting multiple voices for a live children’s puppet show and adorned with a wonderfully unkempt mass of horribly dyed-blonde hair, Binoche has never been like this onscreen; with Kieslowski and Malle she’s been porcelain and morose, with Haneke intense but mostly reactive. Here, Binoche is a flibbertigibbet, unpredictable, given to fits and starts of frustration towards the clutter of her life (especially regarding her unwanted tenant Marc, a friend of her distant boyfriend who’s been slack on paying rent) and intense adoration for her son. As in Caché, she’s surrounded by shelves of books, but this time they’re lovingly mismatched and tossed about, the belongings of a dedicated treasurer rather than the calcified status symbols of a thoughtless collector. She proudly wears sparkly, lumpy dresses over jeans and red track-suit jackets next to clashing leopard-print shirts, and Hou films her with admiration, never condescension."
