In "Paris," there is a story around every corner. A young heart transplant candidate, Pierre, looks down from his balcony to the busy streets of Paris. He finds comfort in observing the everyday details of other peoples lives as his own may be slipping away. A history professor begins to regret the sacrifices he made for his career after his father passes away. In a clumsy, urgent attempt to find love, he sends a text message to an unobtainable coed. An open air market vendor must learn to live again after losing his wife. When Pierre's sister Elise (Juliette Binoche) puts her life on hold to take care of him, they both realize that she has just been going through the motions since her husband left. Pierre convinces her that her life isn't over - it is just beginning. "Paris" is full of so many things that make Paris great: the history, inspiration, life, and love!Movie blessings! Jana Segal Reel Inspiration

This Gallic, Altman-lite, picture-postcard film might as well have been produced by the Paris Tourist Office. What we get is too many stories about the multiplicity of life in Paris. The film could easily have lasted another 30 minutes to sustain the stories it created and discarded, but after all, this is 'tranche de vie".All the clichés are here - the ugly professor who falls for the beautiful girl, whose beauty is only skin deep. Yawn. How many French films have dealt with this cliché? Romain Duris' tragic story seems to be a direct lift from Francois Ozon's superior 'Les Temps Qui Reste'but lacks that film's depth of character. Duris, ultimately, is a poorly conceived protagonist, who, ludicrously seems to be straight, even though all the signs suggest otherwise. Yet again, a mainstream French film has shied away from portraying gay characters.The other inter weaved stories are varied but dull, most concentrating on the disaffected bonhomie of the French bourgeoisie. The stories about the market traders seem inconsequential and piddling almost as if the director bowed to tokenism.All in all, major disappointment and a further concession to Hollywood values.

For anybody who has been following the career of French film maker, Cedric Klapisch (When The Cat's Away,The Spanish Apartment,etc.),this film is a "must see". 'Paris' is Klapisch's love letter to his beloved Paris. Like one of his American influences,Robert Altman,Klapisch's films are ensemble pieces,with overlapping story lines. In this one, we see several Parisian characters who we can easily identify with. There is Pierre,a former dancer,who has learned that he may not have much time left,due to a heart condition. He spends most of his time staring out the window of his apartment,watching life pass by. There is his sister,Elise,who has escaped from a bad marriage,who takes her three children & moves in with Pierre,hoping to somehow cheer him up & try & live with his malady. Other elements include a fifty something historian & professor at the local university (Roland) who has an eye for an attractive student in his class,but is too shy to talk to her up front, so he sends her mushy love letters via text message. Roland's younger brother,Philippe,a well respected architect,who is about to become a father for the first time. Other characters drop in & out of this nicely balanced overview of Parisian life. Klapisch casts his film with the best in French talent that one can conjure up (Juliette Binoche,Roman Dupris,Fabrice Luchini,and the always welcome on screen,Franscois Cluzet). The film's impressive cinematography (with lots of sweeping over head air shots of Paris)is by Christophe Beaucarne. If you got your proverbial groove on with 'Paris,J'taime',check this one out. Spoken in French with English subtitles. Not rated by the MPAA, this film contains pervasive strong language,brief nudity,some sexual content & the aftermath of a horrible automobile accident. Not such a good choice for the little ones (who would probably be bored reading subtitles,anyway)

I just saw this movie "Paris" at my local cinema, and I loved it.You may love it too ...providing you meet a couple caveats. First, you have to like subtitles (or understand quick Parisian French slang pretty well). And second, the medium-fast pacing has to be to your liking. The film is neither impossibly slow nor ridiculously fast - it's just a little on the fast side of middle of the road by today's standards, which may be okay with you. But if you don't like the pacing, the whole film will probably turn you off completely.Several different story lines with mostly different characters proceed simultaneously. They're inter-cut, so we see a scene from one then a scene from another. Sometimes the mixing even switches back and forth before the stories move to the "next" scene, so we see the continuation of the same scene a few minutes later. Every so often two of the story lines will come together briefly, usually bouncing their separate ways again quickly. There's no cutesy effort to bring all the story lines together at once, or to have just one conclusion simultaneously wrap up all the story lines.None of the story lines is deep enough to carry a whole movie (although with different development a couple of them might be); but all together there's more than enough interest to keep the film from being just a travelogue. Each story is a "slice of life," with the story line being the skeleton that adds enough structure to let the characters and events rise above being just amorphous blobs.All the sights are here, but as believable backgrounds to the stories, not as "scenery." If it's in a guide book, there's probably a shot of it somewhere in this movie. The scene constantly changes; without even realizing it, we eventually see all the sights. At one point if you watch carefully and quickly the camera even recreates the view captured on an earlier postcard. Some not-so-conventional sights are included too; who knew that the Paris meat market interior could look like an abstract painting? Academic and theoretical approaches to any "big city" are presented too. But they're presented as just one more way of viewing things; they're not given any sort of precedence or prominence.There's quite a bit of self-reference (although not so much that the device hijacks the movie). The boundaries between "this movie" and "the movie within the movie" are often fuzzed. Several scenes include movie cameras; one early scene even states explicitly that the cameras are shooting the very movie we're watching. The scene with a psychologist can be seen both as straight and as bizarrely bent. It plays on so many levels simultaneously that you may be laughing out loud and squirming uncomfortably in your seat at the same time.Yesterday I watched three old episodes of the TV show Mad Men on DVD, and I'm surprised how stylistically similar this film and that TV show are. Multiple story lines and their characters mix repeatedly and almost randomly. Both forward and backward visual references tie scenes together. Just a few words or gestures often convey an ocean of emotions; if your "emotional IQ" is "challenged," you'd better pay close attention. Production values are very high. The film often looks "casual" to the viewer, but shooting some of those scenes must have been a filmmaker's nightmare. Often events and scenes will build toward a particular "conventional" or "obvious" conclusion, but always something different (often nothing at all) happens. It's as though the film makes a point of yanking our chain repeatedly. And once in a while a story element is clearly stated, but then dropped without further reference.A cynic could see this film as someone showing off that they can include every single trope they learned about in film school. Or better, it can be seen as a thoroughly enjoyable paean to the "City of Light." (One quibble: all the subtitles are presented in the exact same flat beige. When they're against a light colored background -as presented by many of the scenes- they're rather hard to read.)