Paris Feels Like an Obligatory Visit

A A A Comments (1) By Nick Pinkerton Tuesday, Sep 15 2009

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Paris
Directed by Cédric Klapisch
IFC Films
Opens September 18
IFC Center and Lincoln Plaza

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Paris, as overdocumented as any great city, still has new facets to reflect. For proof, see Claire Denis's idiosyncratically observed 35 Shots of Rum—a contrast to Cédric Klapisch's Paris panorama, an encyclopedia of "types" and banal c'est la vie lessons. When an ensemble film works, you welcome the shifts between characters, intrigued to catch up with each in turn, but Paris's rounds feel like obligatory visits. Romain Duris, an actor whose overuse is symptomatic of France's shallow talent pool, does his pre-set clenched-forehead as a dancer facing a possibly fatal illness. Fabrice Luchini's professor of Parisian history gets the lone funny business, sending dirty text messages to a student (Inglourious Basterds's Mélanie Laurent—more spellbinding than Paris co-star Juliette Binoche ever was). The white working-class and African immigrants get obliging nods, and there's François Cluzet's architect, here mostly for a nightmare scene expressing commonplaces about urban planning. There are some good, unusual stop-offs (Rungis, the massive wholesale market; Baudelaire's gilded suite on the Ile Saint-Louis), as well as location resourcefulness (Klapisch coordinates a string of scenes along the city's highest monuments). At a 124-minute runtime, though, the writer-director has stretched a wide canvas, and only sporadically found anything worth filling it with.