Paris-dweller Pierre (Duris, close-shaven and haggard-looking) is a dancer at the Moulin Rouge who has just heard he has a possibly fatal heart disease. Forbidden to work by his doctors, he locks himself in his messy flat, observing life outside only from afar. When he finally musters the courage to tell his older sister Elise (Binoche) about the state of his health, Klapisch gives us a reaction that is as finely observed as anything in his work: she does not cry or hug him but instead launches into an angry tirade – even though it is her brother who is dying.

Pierre’s heart is literally the centre of the film, as his terminal illness makes him appreciate the streets teeming with life all around him more, which in turn serves as an excuse for the writer-director to veer off into an exploration of these lives, some but not all of them directly connected to Pierre and Elise. Characters include a middle-aged history scholar (Fabrice Luchini) who is secretly in love with one his students (Mélanie Laurent); the scholar’s architect brother (François Cluzet) who is apparently happily married; a vegetable seller at the local market (Albert Dupontel) whose kid goes to school with one of Elise’s children and a casually racist baker (Karin Viard) who finds herself employing a girl of Maghrebi origins (Sabrina Ouazani) to help her out.

It is a shame that some stories are given short thrift, and several strands, including Viard’s baker storyline and a seemingly unrelated episode set in Cameroon, have no room for even the slightest narrative surprise. As with all films with intersecting stories, the film is only as good as its weakest link, and Klapisch is not exempt from longueurs and moments of tedium because the necessary viewer investment in yet another set of new characters will start to lag around the hour mark – with still an hour on the clock.

While the director’s view of a world apparently without supermarkets might seem like wishful thinking – every single person goes to the local baker or open-air market to buy his or her groceries – the fact that almost all characters are single or divorced (at least at the beginning of the film) but with children is a nice touch that feels real. Children are not prefabricated obstacles thrown at the characters by the plot but rather seem to simply be a part of the characters’ lives. Still, Klapisch as a writer comes dangerously close to pushing his symbolism too far at times (Pierre has problems with his heart both physically and emotionally and has an apartment with a grandiose view of the Père Lachaise cemetery; "Pierre’s heart" in French also means "heart of stone"), but Klapisch the director steers clear of overt melodrama through a subtle mise-en-scène and a nuanced direction of his actors.

Klapisch gives every actor his or her moment to shine and it is nice to see that he has still not exhausted Duris’s potential as an actor; he is completely credible here as probably the only heterosexual male dancer the Moulin Rouge has ever known (dancing is an important marker of living life to the fullest throughout). Binoche (Le voyage du ballon rouge / The Flight of the Red Balloon) and Laurent (Je vais bien ne t’en fais pas / Don’t Worry, I’m Fine), the new faces in Klapisch’s universe, are deliciously dowdy and luminous respectively, while Maurice Benichou (Caché) has a cameo as Luchini’s (Confidences trop intimes / Intimate Strangers) psychiatrist in one of the film’s most hilarious scenes. Both Luchini and Viard (La tête de maman / In Mom’s Head) starred in Klapisch’s 1991 debut Riens du tout ("Little Nothings"), a department store satire, but have not worked with him since.

As could be expected with the title being what it is, the French capital is very present on screen and Klapisch and cinematographer Christopher Beaucarne know where to point their cameras for contrasts between the old and new, the working and upper classes and the tourist and the residential areas. Francine Sandberg, Klapisch's regular editor, at times goes back to the hip MTV-style editing she let loose on Barcelona’s sights in L’auberge espagnole in an attempt to show familiar sights from a new angle. A dream sequence in which Cluzet's architect walks through his own projects is a neat feat of digital trickery but serves little other purpose.

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