Maybe it was the early-morning media screening, but I found myself bored and frustrated by Hsiao-hsien Hou's latest film.

Where others have found it playful, whimsical and beguiling, I found it inscrutable, ponderous and meandering. I was, however, struck by Juliette Binoche's excellent performance as a woman snowed under by stress, work, financial issues and an absent partner, but I often felt I'd wandered into an observational documentary where nothing much was happening. Evocations of the mundaneness of daily life are convincing, as are depictions of separate worlds never connecting, but it's hard to stay interested when nothing happens.

Binoche plays Suzanne, a puppeteer who hires a Chinese film student as a nanny for her son, Simon. Song Fang wants to make a homage to Albert Lamorisse's film, The Red Balloon, and spends a lot of time shooting on her digital camera, which she also lets Simon use, though we never see the results of this filming. Suzanne's tenant Marc has not paid rent for a year, so she decides to kick him out. This is all that happens in nearly two hours.

Flight of the Red Balloon itself is a homage to Lamorisse's 1956 short, in which a red balloon follows a small boy all over Paris. This 34-minute film came up trumps at Cannes and also won an Oscar for best screenplay-the first dialogue-free film to do so. Lamorisse's film is a fable about creativity, childhood and individuality, and I would have preferred to watch it four times, rather than watch this very slow feature.

Flight of the Red Balloon

Director: Hou Hsaio-Hsien
Starring: Juliette Binoche, Simon Iteanu, Hippolyte Girardot, Song Fang, Louise Margolin

by Kathryn Goldie