If the plastic-bag-in-the-wind scene from American Beauty floated your boat, this featherweight drama from Three Times director Hou Hsiao-Hsien could be right down your rue.

It’s the first in a series of films commissioned to mark the 20th anniversary of the city’s Musee d’Orsay, presenting a naturalistic look at Parisian life with the objectivity of an outsider… and the pace of an undertaker.

Sporting a fading peroxide job, Binoche plays Suzanne, a single mother who employs Taiwanese film student Song (the rather blank Song Fang) to mind her seven-year-old son Simon (wide-eyed moppet Simon Iteanu).

While Suzanne immerses herself in her puppet theatre productions, Simon and Song wander the streets with a camcorder – and the enigmatic orb of the title - before everyone returns to Suzanne’s cramped apartment.

It’s here that we witness a lengthy procession of improvised comings and goings. Simon has a piano lesson. Suzanne gets angry with the scrounging tenant downstairs. A removal man prattles on about how he did his back in.

And so on.

With a fondness for reflective surfaces and long takes, Hou picks up an everyday situation, observes it from various angles, gives it a gentle shake, then puts it down again, seemingly without comment.

Of course, cineastes and the intelligentsia may find deep meaning in the juxtaposition of pinball, piano and PlayStation, discover hidden metaphors in the making of pancakes, and rhapsodise wildly on the poetry of puppetry.

Others will appreciate the simpler significance of either ProPlus or a pillow. Or a well-placed pin.

Elliott Noble