If you're shooting a valentine to Paris count me in, even if your name is Cedric Kaplish onlie begetter of the vastly overrated L'Aubere Espanol and, yes, even if your nominal lead is the even more overrated and under talented Romain Duris, for whom you seem to have a permanent hard-on. Alas, the best-laid schemes ... Probably the strength of this is that Kaplish goes easy on the chocolate-box aspect and gives us more of the ordinary Paris, the one that I, a regular visitor from England, know from walking it's streets en route to one cinema du quartier or another. The film starts promisingly when Duris is told he has a strong chance of dying - something that acting-wise he does in every movie he makes - and then meanders into a labryinth of mini plots and myriad characters until in a blatant steal from Kieslowski's Three Colors:Red, several of them are spotted by Duris from the taxi taking him to hospital. People like Francois Cluzet and Karin Viard are under-used and it is left to Juliette Binoche, Fabrice Luchini and the like to add some class. Kaplish needs a strong script written by someone else to really shine which is why his finest achievement remains Un Air de famille, written by Agnes Jaoui and Jean-Pierre Bacri and it didn't do any harm that the two writers also starred in it. Whilst I'm not prepared to dismiss Paris out of hand I was greatly disappointed.
Review of Paris
