Suzanne, a
puppeteer, lives with her young son Simon in an apartment in
Paris. While Suzanne is busy with producing her new Chinese puppet play based on an ancient Chinese text (求妻煮海人), she hires a Chinese film student, Song, as Simon's new nanny. For her college project — a homage to
Albert Lamorisse's famous 1956 film
The Red Balloon — Song starts to film Simon. She develops a good relationship with mother and son, and translates for Suzanne's masterclass with a Chinese puppet master. While Simon's older sister Louise is about to graduate from a high school in Brussels, Suzanne plans for Louise to apply for colleges in Paris. For that, she tries to evict her downstairs tenant Marc, who has repeatedly failed to pay his rent, while arguing on the phone with Pierre, Simon's father, who has gone off to Canada for two years to write a novel and who is rarely in touch. Simon visits the Musée d'Orsay on a school trip, where his class is shown
The Ball, a painting by
Félix Vallotton in which a child chases a red ball. == Cast ==