Hou Hsiao-hsien's trademark long takes call attention to the passage of time, and as such they're intimately attuned to his ongoing thematic interest in the bonds between the past, present, and future. This preoccupation is once again ubiquitous in The Flight of the Red Balloon, the Taiwanese director's latest tour de force, which finds the director integrating himself into a new, foreign setting—Paris—via the medium of cinema. Whereas Hou's entrée into Japan in Café Lumière was facilitated by the work of Yasujiro Ozu, here his channel is Albert Lamorisse's classic children's film The Red Balloon, to which his newest effort both pays loving homage as well as utilizes as a subtle meta device for yet another of his inquiries into the ways collective cultural history and memories continue to intensely impact the here and now.