(PG) Juliette Binoche

If you’re looking for a film with narrative drive and jump-cut pace, Flight of the Red Balloon won’t float your boat. But if you’re prepared to linger, like Taiwanese director Hou Hsiao-hsien’s cameras do, and observe whimsical connections in everyday situations, such patience will reap rewards.

Flight of the Red Balloon teases viewers with an underlying question: How little do you need to know and observe before what is caught on film can provoke and sustain interest? Might a red balloon floating in the sky, along with a handful of earth-tethered characters who’ve mostly been set loose to invent their own dialogue, be enough?

The answer, for me, is yes. Particularly when one of the characters is played by Juliette Binoche

Bottle-blonde Binoche is the overwrought, full-to-the-brim, Parisian puppet show vocalist Suzanne, whose partner is in Montreal and first child Louise (Louise Margolin) is living with her grandfather in Brussels.

Suzanne’s seven-year-old son Simon (Simon Iteanu) helps hold together what Suzanne perceives to be a crumbling life. Simon, who is both aware and unaware of adult difficulties, drifts in a sea of childhood contentment under the peacefully-attentive eye of Song (Song Fang), a Taiwanese film student newly employed as the boy’s child minder.

There are several neat connections:

• Song is working on a film about a red balloon and trains her camera on Simon carrying and releasing a red balloon as he walks around Paris.

• Simon goes to the Musee d’Orsay with his class and the children reflect on what’s happening in Felix Vallotton’s 1899 painting of a child chasing a red sphere called “Le Ballon”. As the class points out, the painting offers both a liberating and a shadowy perspective about being a child.

• The film is the first in a program financed by Musee d’Orsay and is Hou Hsiao-hsien’s tribute to a 50-year-old movie by Albert Lamorisse called The Red Balloon.

The balloon floats through the streets and skies of Paris amid other innocent red circles in advertising, painted on buildings and found in reflections. These, too, seem to be “balloons” — and the red balloon is an image that captures well the fleeting intensity, abandonment and floating weightlessness that can often mark childhood and the loneliness that may continue into adulthood.

Suzanne most vividly exudes childlike joy when she is dramatically rendering the voices of her beloved puppets. These scenes provide some of the finest moments in the movie as well as some of the most distinctive in Binoche’s pitch-perfect career.

Song Fang is Suzanne’s foil and her Zen-like stillness offers a lovely counterpoint to Suzanne’s frenetic and volatile persona.

By the end, I felt like I’d been looking through a half open window, effortlessly witnessing and being lifted beyond the emotions and conversations that occur in, and give shape to, these ordinary (Parisian middle class) lives.

Marjorie Lewis-Jones