Marveilleuse Binoche is finally opening it’s doors to the public! After a long time, we present to you Juliette-Binoche.net, the first fansite for the talented actress Juliette Binoche. Juliette is best known for her roles in The English Patient, Blue, Wuthering Heights and Chocolat, to pick just a few ones. We’re here to support Juliette’s career, and provide you, her fans, with an online resource for everything you may want on her.

Our gallery is already open, but as this site is still on the beginning, it’s a long way off being complete. But you can expect updates soon. The site is still a temporary version, but I’m working on the site’s content.

Any and all comments, suggestions and contributions are always more than welcomed so please contact us if you have anything to say. Enjoy your visit, add us to your bookmarks and come back again soon!

Flight of the Red Balloon
Directed by Hou Hsiao-hsien. Written by Hou Hsiao-hsien and François Margolin. With Juliette Binoche, Simon Iteanu and Fang Song. (Unrated)

Obviously there’s just something about French-language films on American movie screens that makes us swoon. Consider the impunity with which they make a sport of our beloved narrative conventions. Taiwanese director Hou Hsiao-hsien’s all-but plotless Flight of the Red Balloon, for instance, offers a rare form of suspense, encouraging us to wonder whether anything is actually going to happen in it.

The answer: nope, not really. Neither a sequel nor a remake of Albert Lamorisse’s perennially kid-pleasing 1956 short The Red Balloon, Hou’s film plays as leisurely hovering, ambient homage: a bloom of quiet mirth in the graceful state of childhood. It makes fine use of a drowsy-eyed seven-year-old Parisian boy named Simon (Simon Iteanu) and of the sense, as in Lamorisse’s film, that a balloon is somehow looking after him. Read more… »

Juliette Binoche, introducing “Flight of the Red Balloon” to audiences at the Toronto International Film Festival in September, described the project as a “life-changing experience.”

A tad dramatic maybe, but hey, she’s an actress.

The next day, as she prepared to introduce another of her movies at the festival - Amos Gitai’s “Disengagement” - Binoche elaborated.

“I had never experienced such complete trust from a director,” she said, referring to Hou Hsiao Hsien, the Taiwanese filmmaker who took the 1956 children’s cinema classic “The Red Balloon” and, well, flew with it in his improvisational, slice-of-Parisian-life homage.

“There was a script, but it had no dialogue - none,” Binoche recalled with a hearty laugh during an interview in Toronto. “There were discussions about the story, but that was it. On the set, Hou just trusted us … and now and then he would supply some facts that you needed to know to follow the story. And I was overwhelmed by that. I thought it was so generous.” Read more… »

French star is a one-take wonder in Taiwanese filmmaker Hou Hsiao-Hsien’s uplifting homage to Paris

BY Jason Anderson
Working in France (and outside of Asia) for the first time, Taiwanese master Hou Hsiao-hsien couldn’t have made a more appropriate casting decision than Juliette Binoche. Besides being one of world cinema’s most famous faces for two decades, Binoche remains uncommonly adventurous for such a major star. Hollywood projects such as Chocolat and Dan in Real Life are outnumbered on her CV by films with some of the world’s most revered directors, Binoche having followed indelible early performances for Leos Carax and Krzysztof Kieslowski with more recent turns for Michael Haneke (Caché), Abel Ferrara (Mary) and Abbas Kiarostami (the forthcoming The Certified Copy).
But even after all those experiences, working with Hou on Flight of the Red Balloon — which starts a two-week run at the Royal this weekend — presented particular challenges. Like most of his films, Hou’s first European-made feature is dominated by lengthy scenes in which the characters gradually reveal themselves in tiny, subtle increments. Read more… »