A character that's lighter than air

In Hou Hsiao-hsien's "The Flight of the Red Balloon," the enigmatic title character wafts around Paris, boards a Metro and catches the attention of a little boy, Simon (Simon Iteanu). Though the relationship between boy and balloon in Albert Lamorisse's 34-minute classic "The Red Balloon" (1956) was ardent, Simon's interest in the scarlet bubble is no more than curious. Children have changed, Paris has changed and the new balloon, a passive rather than an active presence, is palpably forlorn compared with its predecessor.

"I use the red balloon as a kind of old soul," Hou, 61, said recently through a translator. "It was a novelty for the little boy in the original film, but it's less of one for the boy in my film. He has other distractions -- piano lessons, video games. So the red balloon isn't able to intervene. That's my philosophy -- I don't believe intervention is possible. The structure of society is established. As a filmmaker, you can only come in as an observer."

"The original red balloon was a troublemaker," said Pascal Lamorisse, who was 5 1/2 when he appeared in his father's Oscar-winning film. "It raises hell at the school and the church, and it's showing that those institutions are too strict. The balloon in Hou Hsiao-hsien's film is more a symbol of unreachable peace of mind."

Accordingly, it mirrors the plight of Suzanne, played by a startlingly blond Juliette Binoche. She is a good-natured but fraught woman who has been abandoned by her boyfriend to bring up Simon alone; her much-missed daughter from a previous relationship resides in Belgium. Abused by her tenants, trying to juggle parenthood and her job as a puppeteer, Suzanne hires a Taiwanese nanny (Fang Song) to look after Simon. She is a student filmmaker who offers a calm perspective on Suzanne's domestic turmoil. The drama is slight, but Hou poeticizes it.

An outsider's view

The eminent Taiwanese director, whose films include "The Puppetmaster" (1993) and "The Flowers of Shanghai" (1998), previously observed a foreign city with his trademark serenity when he directed "Cafe Lumiere" in Tokyo. That 2003 film paid homage to Yasujiro Ozu in his centenary year and to "Tokyo Story" in particular by acknowledging the communication gap between generations and through a regretful depiction of the evolving metropolis.

"The Flight of the Red Balloon," in French, is more casual in tone, especially in its embrace of both Paris and "The Red Balloon." "Where 'Cafe Lumiere' was a tribute to Ozu, I didn't see 'The Flight of the Red Balloon' as a tribute at all," Hou said.