Starring Juliette Binoche and Song Fang. In French with English subtitles. Unrated.

Well past familiar to festivalgoers but certainly a stranger to multiplex masses, Taiwanese director Hou Hsiao-hsien makes his first non-Chinese-language film with Flight of the Red Balloon, and it’s in French—a language he doesn’t speak. No matter. The perspective here is that of an outsider adrift in Paris, the city of dreamers and subject of the classic short film referred to in the title.

Like many of us, Hou saw The Red Balloon—about a boy chasing his lost balloon through the French capital—in school and was entranced by its fluid, nonverbal storytelling. Here, he conveys that sense of childlike wonderment by centering the story on a Chinese film student called Song (Song Fang) who has been hired as a nanny to inquisitive Simon (Simon Iteanu). Indeed, she watches him with the benign resolve of the balloon that really does hover at the beginning and end of this quietly satisfying homage to Albert Lamorisse’s 1956 hit, which helped touch off an unprecedented craze for foreign films in the United States.

Song herself wants to make a tribute to the famous flicklet, and this Flight is filled with cross-references, including the dissection of a spooky painting at the Musée d’Orsay that comments on the original’s semihidden theme: the absence of parents. Simon’s mom, Suzanne—played by Juliette Binoche with frowzy blond hair and leather jackets—supplies the voices for a Paris puppet show (another of Hou’s touchstones). But when around, she’s generally caught up in her own small dramas with tenants who, in turn, are connected with her erstwhile boyfriend or with her grown daughter, presumably from another relationship. (For some reason, her son refers to the girl as his “pretend” sister.)

Amid the placid street scenes, visits to the puppet theatre, and use of old footage suggesting memory and loss, Suzanne’s hissy fits—always staged in front of kiddies and other innocents—provide the only hints of narrative conflict in a relatively plot-free environment. But Binoche’s character, and performance, are vital. Like Paris herself, she is capricious, snooty, tired, still beautiful, and capable of surprising tenderness.