From The WSJ:



The French writer-director Cédric Klapisch makes fiction films that are better than most documentaries at tracking the ravages and felicities of urban renewal, the connections between people and their neighborhoods, the ties that both bind and torment families. In his latest feature, “Paris,” he does all of that and then some. “Paris” sees life—on earth, not just in La Ville Lumière—as a dance of human connections, some of which fail while others endure.



That’s equally the case with the film, whose central character, a professional dancer named Pierre (Romain Duris), is terrified to find himself afflicted by possibly terminal heart disease. Some connections are less vivid than others, a few vignettes fail to thrive. As a whole, though, “Paris” pulses with a contemporary version of the energy that animated Balzac’s novels, or Colette’s accounts of the life she observed from the window of her apartment in the Palais Royal. (It also pulses to a sensationally eclectic score.)



Pierre is an attentive observer too, but the movie takes a longer and wider view than he can command from his upstairs window on the world, or during his cautious meanderings through the streets. It finds specific connecting points—a text message on a mobile phone, an avocado in a produce warehouse—between would-be lovers and lovers-to-be. Pierre’s sister, Elise (the ever-enchanting Juliette Binoche) does more than flirt with a fishmonger at an open-air market. A renowned historian turned TV host, Roland (Fabrice Luchini), stalks a beautiful student with startling results. (”I’m really not a Machiavellian pervert,” he insists during their first meeting.) Roland’s architect brother, Philippe (François Cluzet), dreams a dream—a stunning set piece within the film—of designing a perfect neighborhood populated by perfectly normal people.



Refreshingly, no one is normal in “Paris”—no one even comes close. Mr. Klapisch’s special gift is to populate his films with perfectly grounded eccentrics who use perfectly ordinary words to express poetic ideas. One of those ideas is the ceaseless tension between old and new in the evolution of cities, and one of the characters who obliquely expresses it is the cabbie who takes Pierre to the hospital for an operation that will save or end his life. “Richard-Lenoir is jammed,” the cabbie says, invoking both a boulevard and French history without thinking of it, then rattling off a string of alternate routes, and hallowed names, that include Bastille and Voltaire. The modern Paris of “Paris” lives in an ever-present past.



- Joe Morgenstern