Paris

When an ensemble film works, the shifts between characters are welcomed, and viewers are intrigued to catch up with each in turn. Paris‘ rounds feel like obligatory visits. Romain Duris does his preset 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‘ Mélanie Laurent). 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. Despite the location resourcefulness (including a coordinated string of scenes along the city’s highest monuments), writer-director Cédric Klapisch has stretched a wide canvas and only sporadically found anything worth filling it.