Taiwanese master Hou Hsiao-hsien pays tribute to Albert Lamorisse’s 1956 classic short “The Red Balloon” with this loose adaptation, about a harried single mother (Juliette Binoche) whose lonely young son is followed by the titular flying object. Where Lamorisse’s film was a simple elegy about childhood innocence and finding friendship in unexpected places, Hou’s lengthening and modernizing of the story incorporates a metaphor of life in a big city as that of increasing frustrations and troubles, where the young boy represents purity, the boy’s new care-giver, a film student with a poetic eye, represents imagination, and the middle aged mother represents the daily difficulties of basic existence, sometimes devoid of both purity and imagination, but essential all the same to the human fabric. You have to find these metaphors for yourself in Hou’s work, what he gives you is a slow, often motionless, series of vignettes where people either just talk, stare, or react to other people talking and staring; it’s a carefully controlled mise-en-scene that is both beautiful and maddening, not unlike the films of protege Tsai Ming-liang, or fellow tri-named Asian masters Anh Hung Trang, Kim Ki-duk, and, though a bit more expressive, Wong Kar Wai.