The Paris shot in this movie is rather an old city that is still alive today than the city of lights. However I live there since 11 years and my Paris is very different: in the movie, characters walk outside and have spectacular views from their windows: the real Paris is to be underground in the metro and to have rooms opened on inner courtyard! Next, you can say that Klapish is still the best innovative French author as well for writing stories as for visualizing them. Here, he is playing with interfering a lot of characters in the same city. It's intelligent because it takes the pulse of what life is. Sometimes, it's brilliant when Klapish uses iconic sights of Paris to link the characters (the scene with Eiffel tower, Montparnasse Tower and Montmartre, the final with the car cruise) but the movie is mainly like all the movies of that genre: a boring slide-show. About the stories told, they aren't really gripping or interesting: it's mainly a tasteless syrupy melodrama (thus an usual French movie). But Klapish has reunited a top cast to tell them. Romain is always this sensitive, lost guy with a big heart and it was great to see him illuminated during his scene with his charming girlfriend, Olivia Bonamy. In addition, Klapish saves sometimes the day with his humor and wit (the psychoanalyst session is funny, the looming death is always broken…). In conclusion, it's not Klapish at his best but it's also not his worst either. It's more interesting and more in touch with the city than the awful « Paris, Je T'Aime » so as i rated the latter « 1 », I rate this one « 4 » (but sometimes close to « 7 »).

Had difficulty in deciding to watch this at first: The main character is terminally ill, etc. so a sad and may be depressing I thought. But no,the movie that comes out of this plot is brilliantly inspiring of life ! And this done without letting you suffer through sad, painful scenes or trying to make feel good by taking an overly optimistic approach, showing the good side of things, etc. NO ! It is simply presenting some everyday life characters living in a beautiful city. The life naturally flows through them. Whether they like it or not...My first Klapish film. Brillianlty done. Will definitely watch his other works.

I could watch any film starring the beautiful and talented French actress Juliette Binoche and have seen most of her England-language work, but naturally most of her 40 or so movies are in her first language, including this one from 2008."Paris" is not just a French film, it is a quintessentially Gallic flic. Writer and director Cedric Klapisch makes the eponymous capital city almost an actor in itself with plentiful shots of familiar and unfamiliar locations and typical French spots like the cafe, the boulangerie, and the food market. Also tres Francais is the plentiful dialogue, the existential angst, the beautiful women, the mandatory intellectual, and the odd couplings (although the actual sex is never seen), while Klapisch gives us unconnected characters (Paris is the only thread) and unresolved lives (more like real life than reel life).Binoche plays a social worker who clearly takes her professional work seriously because she is herself a single mother of three children and needs to take time off work to care for her brother (Romain Duris) who has a heart condition that may be fatal. It's all very watchable with social concerns leavened with some humour, but in the end I found it rather indulgent and too loosely worked. Some more narrative structure and drive would have lifted the film from a curiosity to a cur

The movie is mostly made of vignettes following several characters, loosely interconnected in the city of Paris. Sounds familiar. To be honest, I've grown tired of the many dramas borrowing that formula. It's become an epidemic, especially since Magnolia. And so, I did not expect to enjoy Paris all that much. But I loved it and it moved me by its stripped down, sincere approach.Director and writer Cédric Klapisch, unlike several of his contemporaries, did not feel the need to employ convoluted means to link these characters, or end the movie on some sort of unifying, highly artificial bang. Klapish wisely elects to concentrate on building strong characters. He succeeds, so much so that it becomes easy for him to create simple, believable story lines for them. The real link between them? They are fallible, restless, tentative, longing... in other words, they are human.There's a large cast here and Klepish mostly concentrates on a few of them. Many of the smaller parts are actually as intriguing as the bigger roles and I caught myself wondering what would happen to those characters. But Klapisch stays the course and ends the movie much like it began. A lot is left unresolved, much like life. No Hollywood ending here but I could certainly have followed those characters for another hour if need be.A beautiful, stripped down story but enough subtext and genuine quality to make for a great and lasting movie experience.