Flight of the Red Balloon/Le voyage du ballon rouge is like the hot air tricolor balloon with which Napoleon thought to impress Gallic glory on the Mamluks. In 1798 Egypt the latter crashed and burned on its maiden voyage, and the 2007 red-lead balloon movie is too slight yet artificially freighted to take off in any breeze.

This last year’s Cannes, Toronto and New York festivals entry is both homage to a quieter Paris seemingly just yesterday away, and in theory to, “inspired by,” that bigger than art house favorite, The Red Balloon/Le ballon rouge. The slight 1956 thirty-four minutes written and directed by Albert Lamorisse featured son Pascal as lonely Pascal, who befriends a stray red balloon and is borne over City of Light chimney pots and domes by a bunch of colored ones.

Like the first two parts of his Three Times, Taiwanese Hou Hsiao Hsien’s newest advances slowly, with care for detail, reduced dialogue and few characters, but though it skirts types of relationships in a reduced corner of metropolis, this one comes up too empty, simply not enough here for seven minutes shy of two hours.

The script fully blocked but minus dialogue, much depends on silences and gestures -- a child’s face through a bistro window and its image reflected on a pinball machine -- and on actors’ lines improvised to the situation. Song Fang is quietly good as bilingual Taiwanese Beijing-educated film student and nanny Song; as single mom Suzanne, Juliette Binoche impresses, for example when, seated alone before a bookcase, she reacts to voices from others present but offscreen or on the telephone; as her cute tousle-haired seven-year-old Simon, Simon Iteanu is film-cute and tousle-haired, though physical activity and a little friend or two would do him good.

Beyond these three, apart from downstairs Marc (Hippolyte Girardot), who rents from Suzanne but doesn’t pay, relationships are difficult to figure out precisely. Simon refers to Louise (Louise Margolin) as his older “pretend sister, not my real sister” who regularly visits in the summer from Brussels, where she lives with maternal grandfather but seems a half-sister, their mother’s child from an unspecified earlier marriage or encounter. Simon’s father, perhaps within marriage, Pierre, is only another voice on a call from Montreal, where vague university duties are slowing down a book he is supposed to be doing.

The title “character” is indeed red, immaculately round, never deflating and trailing a most straight white string. It refuses to heed Simon’s call at a Metro entrance, “not listening; balloon, are you coming with me?” But it follows him to an elevated stop, and then at sporadic moments peers through house or art museum windows at him or floats by its wall-painted twin that Song captures with her ever-ready video camera. Some will read something deeper here, while others will find sweet caprice or the above-mentioned homage, but in truth nothing would have been lost if the balloon had fallen to a cutting room floor.

An only partly seen kitchen which Marc and maybe live-in girlfriend Flora often mooch; a lived-in book-and-papers-cluttered main room; and two small bedrooms up two open stairs, make up disorganized, leaning towards desperate Suzanne’s flat. Among the disorder, she cannot locate the tenancy agreement -- Simon does -- to evict Pierre’s deadbeat scriptwriter friend Marc and so, along with talked-of redecorating, tune and stuff the piano back upstairs for her “scamp” son’s music lessons. And in the mess that is her life, she cannot get Louise’s visit settled or retrieve two-years-long-gone Pierre.

Not all is helter-skelter, for Suzanne lucks into hiring calming influence Song to collect Simon from school and be a minder-companion while she is absorbed in the puppet show she has written and voices. Her new work appears in rehearsal snatches and derives from a fourteenth century Mongol-Chinese play about a lover who retrieves his beloved from the Dragon King’s seabed by boiling away the water. Doubly lucky, in fact, because Song can translate when the two women go to a performance by a touring Chinese master puppeteer.

All this is puzzling, although it may not be intended to “signify” anything. Possibly the pieces mirror Suzanne’s life, as she perseveres only a few steps removed from having things fly off in too many directions to handle. The folk tale of the hand puppet shows, the ultimately non-involved observations of the balloon, seem extraneous and outside. Its realistic but slow pacing belying a hectic thirty-day shoot, Flight of the Red Balloon never coalesces, though there will be those who find a certain charm in such scenes from a superficially uneventful corner of the city. 

(Released by IFC Films; not rated by MPAA.)