Like Krzysztof Kieslowski’s cinematic triptych Trois Couleurs, Cédric Klapisch’s Paris uses an ensemble of loosely connected characters to get out how our communities – and specifically the city of Paris – frame and form our lives. There’s Pierre (Romain Duris), a former-dancer who is awaiting a heart transplant and faces the likelihood of impending death, and his sister Élise (Juliette Binoche), a warm-hearted single-mother, whose years of loneliness have left her stony and unwelcoming to new romance. The life of the professor Roland Verneuil (Fabrice Luchini) plays out in parallel. The detached, empirical historian becomes anxious and neurotic after the death of his father, rubbing his relationship with his brother Philippe Verneuil (François Cluzet) and inspiring a lurid romance with his beautiful young student Laetitia (Mélanie Laurent), who happens to live in an apartment facing Pierre. In the streets below, a third drama plays out among the fishmongers and produce salesmen in the local market. Jean (Albert Dupontel) is separated from his wife and business partner Caroline (Julie Ferrier) who flirts with the bawdy fish seller Franky (Gilles Lellouche), while her husband strikes up a friendship with Élise, a frequent customer.

With all these intersecting storylines, it would have been easy for Paris to become muddled or thin, but Klapisch skillfully balances them all. After all, the real subject of her film, as the title suggests, is the dynamic city of Paris, a city that, as Roland Verneuil tells us in a classroom scene, is the setting of a never ending battle between the ancient and the modern. The city’s struggles with her own past are what keep the city continually new. The characters are driven, as one might expect in the city of love, by their hopes and anxieties over finding romance. It is in these relationships that the old and new collide, with the awkwardness of old fashioned sexual morality hitting a fun-loving promiscuousness head on.

Pierre sleeps with Élise’s co-worker, but she “can’t handle” what Pierre understood as a one-night fling. Élise rejects a one-night fling, unable to engage in casually physicality, only to later find herself in a tender, loving relationship with Jean. Roland’s sexy encounters with Laetitia only lead him to heartbreak when he discovers Laetitia has other partners, and he discovers himself to be as much of a sexual idea as she was to him. Roland’s brother, meanwhile, is expecting his first child, but is thrown into a panic when his brother suggests his life is normal – read: boring and irrelevant. And Caroline’s flirtations with Franky push her over the edge when he gropes, teases, and humiliates her at a party, pushing her to the point of tears.

As a portrait of a city, Paris does well to keep the direct talk about the city to a minimum, instead using the stories of these many lives to reveal the place to us. Pierre is a balcony voyeur, and he speaks to his sister about the comfort in watching the drama of others lives play out around him. In his classroom and also on a local television show, Roland talks about the history of his city, but rather than coming off as stale or too cerebral, the history lesson informs his own anxieties about his relevance, age, mortality, and desire for young romance. Although there is one additional storyline between a young model and an immigrant from North Africa that seems tacked on, the majority of characters, when taken as a whole, reveal how the life of the city is invigorated by the proximity and diversity of individuals. Typical Paris, one might say, it is the convergence of social classes glued together by the universality of romance and attraction that seeds the life of the city.

All this, realized with strong performances led by Juliette Binoche, makes Paris a cozy, enjoyable watch. Despite the seeming presence of high drama, the film maintains a modest tone. It is an easy going pleasure, an experience not dissimilar to curling up in a window-side table in a Parisian café with a cup of coffee on an autumn day and watching the people go by. Life gets messy, Klapisch seems to say, but in Paris it always remains sweet.