Song (Song Fang), left, is Simon's (Simon Iteanu) babysitter in the film Flight of the Red Balloon. (IFC Films)

A little boy named Simon (Simon Iteanu), shaggy and gentle, stands at the entrance of a Paris subway station trying to coax a huge red balloon down from the sky. It bobs above like the ultimate lollipop, not yielding to the boy even as he promises it candy and love.

Simon has a new nanny, a film student from Beijing named Song (Song Fang), who is attempting to make her own version of Albert Lamorisse’s 1956 short film The Red Balloon. In the 34-minute classic, a red balloon hovers above a little boy, tethering him to his childhood as he moves through a bustling postwar Paris and towards adulthood.

Song’s film is the homage within an homage that is Hou Hsiao Hsien’s Flight of the Red Balloon, an elegant yet frustrating effort from the Taiwanese filmmaker, whose films, like Café Lumiere and Flowers of Shanghai, are often told with a uniquely poetic visual vocabulary. Hou’s epitaph will read “lyrical.” In film criticism, that word, as all savvy readers know, is often a euphemism for “I fell asleep,” and there were times watching Flight of the Red Balloon when my teeth hurt from boredom. This is a slow film. Snail-on-crutches slow. Democratic primaries slow. Suh-looooooow.

But when it works, the slowness breeds a pleasant, meditative mood, rather than functioning like Valium. Hou moves his liquid, unobtrusive camera between the spaces of Simon’s life. Simon lives with his mother in a modest apartment, paper-crammed and darkened by dusty curtains. Mom is Suzanne (Juliette Binoche), a frazzled bohemian whose day job is voicing puppets for a troupe specializing in historical Chinese plays. (Paris, je t’adore! Over here, struggling bohos work at Starbucks.) Peering out from beneath a shock of roots-addled bleached-blond hair, Suzanne seems ill suited for either the responsibilities of motherhood or the daily abrasiveness of the world.

The film belongs to Binoche, who improvises Suzanne into a marvelous creation, an artistic woman approaching middle age who has gone a little Grey Gardens. Like the puppet she’s voicing who is trying to boil away the ocean to find his lover, Suzanne tries desperately to control the chaos around her. Semi-impoverished, she’s constantly stomping her feet and complaining, running her hands through that bristly ’do, scheming for a changed future.

She is also utterly in love with her son. When Suzanne comes home and sees Simon after whirling through the apartment, she stops, kneels down and they share an eye-to-eye grin, caught in a moment of mutual adoration.

Then she is back up, perhaps justifiably angry at her circumstances. Simon’s father has vanished to Montreal to work on a novel that will never be finished. Downstairs, his friends make lousy tenants in an apartment she owns. There is a daughter, a half-sister to Simon, in Brussels whom Suzanne longs for but rarely sees. Gradually, this difficult, single-mom figure begins to make sense; the explanatory pieces of her damage come together. Hou uses this same patient puzzle-making to forge connections between other characters: you only figure out who is a lover, who is a friend, who is who, by giving in to his languid pace. The shape of people’s lives emerges slowly; characters come into meaning as if breaking through the surface of muddy swamps.

Juliette Binoche portrays Suzanne, a busy single mother in Flight of the Red Balloon. (IFC Films)

There is inherent beauty in a story of a child surrounded by adults who care about him, ballasting him amid the loneliness of the big city. Simon is also watched over by this big, metaphoric balloon, which may or may not be (or sometimes is and sometimes isn’t) a prop in Song’s film, of which Simon is the unknowing star.

But for all Flight’s fantastic camera work – director of photography Mark Lee Ping Bing creates endless effortless shots – it hits more weakly than the original film, which is one-quarter its length. The whimsy of Lamorisse’s Balloon was matched by an unspoken drama (the film is dialogue-free); the boy was caught in a wider web of foreboding. The social structure of France loomed ahead for him, impenetrable.

Hou seems uninterested in France as anything more than nostalgia; its modern racial complexities are nearly absent – Song’s immigrant status is never examined in any way – and a kind of myopia sets in. Flight is soft, set to a slight, tinkling piano score. When it pulls too far back from Binoche’s remarkable performance as fiery, fascinating Suzanne, the film loses air. Finally, it drops from its beautiful sky.

Flight of the Red Balloon opens in Toronto on May 16, with other cities to follow.

Katrina Onstad is the film columnist for CBCNews.ca.