Little White Lies magazine

In Paris, the point is life. The point is that the humdrum petit minutiae of a city – its moans and groans, its stresses and mundanity – are a metaphor for each and every one of us; getting stuck in our day-to-day, losing the bigger picture, losing ourselves.
 
Pierre (Romain Duris) says it to his sister Élise (Juliette Binoche). He has a fatal heart condition, needs a new one, and there she is bemoaning the fact she’s a single mother at 40. He tells her to wake up, see how much she’s got going for her, and she does.
 
This collage of Parisians, Pierre and Élise, brothers Roland (Fabrice Luchini) and Philippe (Francois Cluzet), and the people whose lives they touch, derive self-realisation from the architecture of the city. Fate is in there too; how death, the threat of death and sudden death throw life into relief. How observation of detail does that too: four green bins symmetrically lined up on the street below, the feel of hot coffee between your hands.
 
Such objectification shows us how to find beauty in small pleasures and yet simultaneously serves as the film’s failing. Director Cédric Klapisch’s desire to defamiliarise causes loss of identification and intimacy – in the same way that the repeated motif of characters with their backs to us essentially severs connection.
 
A film about a failing heart must not forget to keep its own humanity, and Paris is at its most exhilarating when Duris takes his failing body and tries to dance. It evokes Shakespeare’s ‘When you do dance, I wish you a wave o’ the sea, that you might ever do nothing but that.’ And embodies life in all its splendour.