The spirit of Albert Lamorisse's iconic 1956 short film The Red Balloon floats, quite literally, over Hou's first European project as a kind of ruse, a playful act of misdirection meant more as poetic counterpoint to the drama rather than pointed thematic signifier. Where Lamorisse’s anthropomorphized helium sack was a character unto itself as well as a plot catalyst, Hou’s balloon—blown to and fro over Parisian streets—materializes here and there without explanatory context, its existence just a simple fact of life to admire from afar. Herein lies the film’s structural and philosophical backbone: life is a series of chance occurrences carried along by currents outside our control. Within this framework Hou observes the quotidian dramas of an overworked single mother, her son, and his nanny (another of Hou’s filmmaker surrogates). Warmly compassionate even as it practices Zen-like restraint, Flight of the Red Balloon finds Hou’s camera at its most liberated, seemingly unburdened of the traditionally over-determined nature of film production and free to respond to the vagaries of mood, light, and circumstance.