With any luck, “Flight of the Red Balloon,” which opens Friday at IFC Center, will attract a swath of new fans to the inimitable work of Hou Hsiao-hsien. There are hooks, such as they are: The film features Juliette Binoche, whose art-house star streaks from “The Unbearable Lightness of Being” to “Caché.” And there’s the cozily inviting reference to “The Red Balloon,” the French children’s classic of 1956 by Albert Lamorisse that inspired Mr. Hou. There’s Paris (always), home to the characters. And there is a mingled beauty, warmth, and sensitivity that might invite moviegoers who quailed at the thought of past must-sees such as “the Romanian abortion drama” or “the Yangtze dam saga.”

But, really, carving and parceling “Flight of the Red Balloon” doesn’t capture the experience of observing the lives of Suzanne (Ms. Binoche), her beloved son Simon (Simon Iteanu), and the young Chinese film student (Fang Song) who helps look after him. Mr. Hou renders with equal skill and subtlety the love of an impassioned, busy mother for her adorable grade-school son, who is just coming into his own, and the light that glows in their cluttered apartment and changes with the seasons of the day.

Mr. Hou’s opening sequence neatly introduces the characters and rhythms with the elegance of linked musical motifs. Spotting the lingering red balloon, Simon clambers onto a Beaux Arts subway stop and, addressing it, tries to coax it along. Moving from this dreamy world of play, the camera tracks the balloon as it floats behind tree branches. Playing on our strained search for the red circle, Mr. Hou soon cuts to a bus slowly pulling away from a curb to reveal not the balloon but the nanny we will soon meet, Song Fang.

Song and Simon visit his mother at her theater, its doors a fresh-painted red. After the camera peers round a gesturing wooden puppet in the imagination-spurring darkness, Suzanne is visible offstage, voicing the performance in singsong cascades. She sports the mix-and-match clothing and straggly blonde dye job we’ll get to know as she whirls through her days. The balloon will return as a presiding spirit of movement and focus; Song, who’s working on a digital remake of Lamorisse’s classic, stands in for Mr. Hou as a visiting, communing artist.

As you may already have guessed, “Flight” is not the drama of a single mother struggling to have it all. Though Mr. Hou is precise, his style is about as aggressive as a certain helium container. Suzanne, who lives in a duplex but seems to own the barn-like house, wrangles a deadbeat tenant who was taken on in the days of her now-absent boyfriend, but that conflict and others are subsumed to express aspects of her personality and the space itself. Equally important, in a way, is the day Suzanne’s piano is tuned, as if evoking the modulations of the film. A piano motif also figures as a subtle temporal bridge now and then: When movers lug the instrument from one floor to another, Suzanne wonders at their skill as one would of a great artist. It’s part of the film’s abiding attitude toward craft, creation, and play, and includes Suzanne’s puppetry, old 16 mm footage of her puppeteer grandfather, Song’s laptop footage editing, and Simon’s Nintendo GameBoy.

“Flight” is Mr. Hou’s first French-language film, and as a visitor of sorts, he has left dialogue and other details to the improvisation of the actors. Ms. Binoche flourishes, throwing herself into the alternating pools of refuge-like calm and flights of frenzy that physically possess her character. As her son, Mr. Iteanu seems to be another child who takes to screen performance with the comfort and ease of playtime. In one scene, he even seems to one-up Ms. Binoche: When she knocks into a lamp hanging over the kitchen table, his casual-playful “Mind the lamp!” sounds utterly impromptu.

Mr. Hou keeps his camera gazing at the same door-table-kitchen composition for such domestic scenes, and it’s one of the ways in which “Flight” distills the powerful techniques of his challenging past work, such as “The Puppetmaster,” his 1993 masterpiece. Apart from the way he and his cinematographer, Lee Ping Bing, render light as natural and alive as a patch of sunlight at your feet, “Flight” shares with the director’s earlier films the sense of past and present coexisting. In one scene, Simon tells Song about his sister, and before we realize it, the camera glides into the past, segueing to the siblings hanging out in a café, playing pinball.

If not as demanding as Mr. Hou’s past history-weighted works, “Flight” rewards multiple viewings, like revisiting a painting. The movie, in fact, ends with a grade-school student at a museum responding to Félix Vallotton’s “Le Ballon,” which depicts a child running (gaily? frantically?) after a ball. It’s an appropriate end to a film that was commissioned by the Musée d’Orsay; Mr. Hou’s wonderful film is indeed a living, breathing work of art and life.