With "Paris, je t'aime" (Paris, I Love You), producer-chef du cinema Emmanuel Benbihy serves up a full meal of deserts -- or are they appetizers? -- in the form of 18 vignettes by 18 cutting-edge European and American directors. Dubbed "Little Neighborhood Romances," they have only two things in common: Paris and love.
But don't expect any swooning to "La Vie en Rose" on the accordion or, for that matter, any other sort of conventional, deliriously romantic experience. The love portrayed in these segments' eponymous Parisian neighborhoods is often hidden, fractured, mocked or mordant -- as unpredictable as the directors' assorted styles and genres, and as likely to feature a vampire, a cowboy or a ghost of Oscar Wilde instead of a traditional pair of lovers. It's about "the plurality of cinema in one mythic location," says Benbihy.
"Each director has been given five minutes of freedom." Some narrative cohesion -- albeit not a lot -- is provided by transitional sequences, plus an introduction and epilogue, attempting to link one fragment of Parisian life (wistful or esoteric) to the next. The concept and the segments don't always work, but when they do -- especially in the last half dozen -- they're worth the wait.
Most engrossing of the auteurs and their narrative neighborhoods of choice: 
Gus Van Sant ("Le Marais"): It's love at first sight in an artists' studio collective, but the lover is a little too eager. He walks up to the boy of his dreams and babbles away: "Maybe we met in a past life?
Do you believe in soulmates? You like jazz? Charlie Parker?
Kurt Cobain?" He gets nothing but mysterious silence in return. Turns out the other guy is American and doesn't understand a word the kid is saying.
Ethan Joel Coen ("Tuileries"): Steve Buscemi plays a hapless tourist on the Metro. Nobody has told him that eye contact with oddballs should be avoided at all costs.
The result is a mugging and a kind of burial shroud of Mona Lisa postcards. Isabel Coixet ("Bastille"): A husband (Sergio Castellitto) tells his wife (Miranda Richardson) he's leaving her for a hot-blooded stewardess but reconsiders when informed that his spouse has terminal leukemia.
"By acting like a man in love," we are told, "he becomes a man in love again." Nobuhiro Suwa ("Place des Victoires"): Juliette Binoche is a grieving mother whose son died a year ago.
Her sorrow is killing her and the rest of her family -- until a clippety-clop sound heralds the horseback arrival of cowboy Willem Dafoe. "Do you want to see your little boy?" he asks.
Does she have the courage to follow him? Alfonso Cuaron ("Parc Monceau"): What is grizzled old Nick Nolte doing schmoozing guilty with young women about "the ball and chain" -- and a nearby baby carriage?
The best episodes are saved for last -- five fine, funny, relatively easy pieces: Richard LaGravenese ("Pigalle"): Bob Hoskins listens to "Tell Me You Love Me for a Million Years" and comes on to Fanny Ardant in a bar: "What would you charge to kiss me?" She slaps him.
His logical response: "You're the only woman I've ever loved." Vincenzo Natali ("Quartier de la Madeleine"): Late at night, Elijah Wood encounters vampiress Olga Kurylenko.
This noir, mini-graphic novel a la "Sin City" ends in mutual ecstatic necking of the dental kind. Gerard Depardieu ("Quartier Latin"): More quarreling -- but more elderly and sophisticated -- brings together the fabulous Gena Rowlands (who wrote the skit, as well) and longtime pal Ben Gazzara for an "amicable" divorce discussion -- in a cafe owned by Depardieu.
Alexander Payne ("14th arrondissement"): This is the masterpiece! A lady letter carrier from Denver takes her French phrasebook to Paris and, commenting along the way in her deliciously bad American accent, visits the grave of Sartre "and his wife Simon Bolivar" -- with other historical and romantic epiphanies.
Even when one or another of these segments fizzles, it goes by quickly and leads to some little miracle of condensed short-storytelling. The bottom line: an enchanting collective tribute -- light, dark and poetic -- to the city of every lover's dreams. Li Xin as Madame Li and Barbet Schroeder as Mister Henny in Christopher Doyle's "Porte de Choisy" segment of "Paris, je t'aime.
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