Paris Je T'Aime by Paul Bullock

Portmanteau films are often hit-and-miss affairs. Wedging a handful of short films into a wider anthology, they frequently seem fragmented, episodic and schizophrenic. On the one hand, this is part of their charm (if a boring segment comes along, at least you know it'll be over soon), but it's also their biggest problem. With little sense of momentum and clashing directorial styles to contend with, it can be difficult for the audience to adapt to each film before it zips off again in to the distance. Paris Je T'Aime never really conquers these problems, but so impressive are the parts that it doesn't really matter that they never add up to a complete whole.

Comprising eighteen short films all set in a different suburb of Paris and connected by the loose theme of love, Paris Je T'Aime brings together some of the best of world cinema. Alexander Payne, Gus van Sant and the Coen brothers represent America, Walter Salles and Alfonso Cuaron bring a South American perspective while Gérard Depardieu and Sylvain Chomet produce a native view of things. And, fittingly, it's a Frenchman who gets the ball rolling as Bruno Podalydes directs 'Montmarte'. A simple tale of a lonely, bitter man who finds love with a woman he helped when she fainted on the street, it provides a neat example of the sweet, short and perfectly-formed kind of films Paris Je T'Aime has to offer.

Yet, it's not long before the film's flaws are also underlined. In one of the more down-to-earth segments, Walter Salles follows a young South American nanny as she puts her baby to sleep by singing him a lullaby. She then crosses town to go to work, where she sings the same ditty to calm her French employees’ young child. Shot with a cinema verite style, Salles’ film is stunning in its simplicity. However, being sandwiched between the Coen brothers magnificently off-beat subway-set story ‘Tuileries’ and Christopher Doyle’s frankly bizarre tale of an Asian hairdressers, its delicate nature is stifled by jarring whimsy.

It's probably best therefore to view Paris Je T'Aime as a cinematic pick n'mix – and one that can produce as many sour lemons as sugary treats. Indeed, for all the lightness and quirkiness the film has to offer, there are moments of Paris Je T'Aime that are dark, bitter and sometimes downright depressing. Maggie Gyllenhaal displays her usual doomed beauty (as well as perfect French) in Olivier Assayas' tale of drug abuse 'Quartier des Enfants Rouges', Elijah Wood appears in Cube helmer Vincenzo Natali's visually-stunning vampire tale 'Quartier de la Madeleine' while death rears its depressing head in Oliver Schmitz's 'Place des Fetes'.

And the theme of death continues into two of the film’s best segments. In Isabel Coixet's heartbreaking 'Bastille', an adulterous husband falls in love again with his dying wife, while a typically intense Juliette Binoche stars in Nobuhiro Suwa’s story of a mother mourning the death of her young son. However, it's not until the very end that we find the film’s best segment. Alexander Payne’s ‘14e arrondissement’ stars Margo Martindale as a lonely middle-aged Texan who ventures to Paris alone to test out her French-speaking skills. Fitting an awful lot of depth into an awfully small running length, Payne has made a film that’s sweet, beautiful and quietly heart-breaking. Much like Paris Je T'Aime as a whole, really…