Maybe a little too French

I could watch any film starring the beautiful and talented French actress Juliette Binoche and have seen most of her England-language work, but naturally most of her 40 or so movies are in her first language, including this one from 2008.

'Paris' is not just a French film, it is a quintessentially Gallic flic. Writer and director Cedric Klapisch makes the eponymous capital city almost an actor in itself with plentiful shots of familar and unfamiliar locations and typical French spots like the cafe, the boulangerie, and the food market. Also tres Francais is the plentiful dialogue, the existential angst, the beautiful women, the mandatory intellectual, and the odd couplings (although the actual sex is never seen), while Klapisch gives us unconnected characters (Paris is the only thread) and unresolved lives (more like real life than reel life).

Binoche plays a social worker who clearly takes her professional work seriously because she is herself a single mother of three children and needs to take time off work to care for her brother (Romain Duris) who has a heart condition that may be fatal. It's all very watchable with social concerns leavened with some humour, but in the end I found it rather indulgent and too loosely worked. Some more narrative structure and drive would have lifted the film from a curiosity to a curio.