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Trailer for "Avenue Montaigne"

There is more than one romantic relationship in Daniéle Thompson’s Avenue Montaigne, but the most important, if unacknowledged, one involves the filmmakers’ love for Paris, and one neighborhood in particular. La vie Parisienne has probably never seemed more elegantly alluring and inviting.

Thompson has contrived a glamorous and dynamic portrait of a Paris street and its environs. (Does it require mentioning that this is an imaginatively reconceived Paris, not the one in north-central France?) In reality, Avenue Montaigne is in a district of luxurious goods and services consumption, including of the arts, which figure importantly in the movie. Thompson’s brisk, brightly lit, lustrously photographed film is a kind of casually structured, omnibus farce. It follows several interwoven subplots with what the press people have termed “twelve charismatic characters.” They’re less charismatic than piquantly eccentric or amusingly off-beat.

The human lynchpin to all this is supposed to be Jessica (Cécile de France), a provincial girl and an orphan save for her nostalgic grandmere. She arrives in this exciting setting and lands a job as the first female server at a neighborhood bistro. This kind of thing keeps happening in the movie.

The filmmakers seem have envisioned Jessica as a friendly naif who keeps intruding into the lives of the rich, sometimes illustrious bar patrons because she’s too innocent to know better. But this isn’t quite right. She is, rather, an assertively optimistic girl who does harbor some understanding of life’s pitfalls. In either case, she’s not so crucial to the movie’s progress as early scenes imply. The movie is more loosely assembled than that.

The interacting characters include drama-queening performing artists, harmlessly idiosyncratic figures of lesser status and other types. American director Sydney Pollack appears as a Scorsese-class visitor from Hollywood (the role is a kind of temporary promotion). Claude Brasseur is an industrialist with a much younger mistress who’s selling his legendary art collection because when something stops breathing, like a life, it’s time to relinquish it, or something like that. (There are two or three of these nearly obligatory little dollops of gallic-flavored philosophy.)

Avenue Montaigne is a lightly appealing, intermittently amusing, tissue-thin diversion. It’s not likely to keep playing in the echoes of your mind afterward, but there are worse results than that to be had from movie-going.