Three-quarters of the way through Cédric Klapisch’s Paris, a young African man who has already traveled a great distance from his home looks over the choppy sea from the Moroccan side of the Strait of Gibraltar and asks the ferryman who will sneak him into Europe if it’s all worth the trouble.

The ferryman, perhaps just eager for payment, replies that it is definitely worth it.

The young man, who is seen only in snippets during his long journey, carries with him a post card sent by a relative.

The black and white image is that of Notre Dame Cathedral, in Paris.

Klapisch, and his mighty ensemble cast, bring that piece of photo paper to vibrant life in a wonderful movie that lives up to the gamble that is its name.

If you’re going to write and direct a film and call it Paris, it had better be worth the trouble.

Nailing the definition of Paris, even in a two-hour film, is a daunting task best left to a seasoned professional.

The celebrated writer / director Klapisch always seems to capture the essence of his subject, be it adolescent angst in Paris of the 70s in Le Péril Jeune or the carnival that is student university life abroad in L’Auberge Espagnole.

With Paris, Klapisch aims his lens again at his hometown and weaves tales of average citizens, played by some of the most outstanding actors working in French film today.

These characters are Paris, a city of aging university professors, flirtatious street market vendors, bourgeois boulangerie proprietors, stressed-out social workers, and poor immigrants looking to make reality out of a dream.

Early on in the film, Juliette Binoche’s Elise stands with her children on the platform outside Montmartre’s Sacré Coeur, overlooking the city.

They ask her to point out different buildings, such as the Montparnasse Tower, which she dutifully does, gesturing toward the black skyscraper that most see as a blight on Paris’ skyline.

Then, one of her children asks, “And where is the universe?”

Elise scans the gray slate roofs sprawling out before her, the golden domes which bump up here and there, and the two great towers, that of Montparnasse and the other, the revered and iconic one built by Eiffel.

The answer, of course, is that Paris is the universe for its denizens, and it stretches as far as the eye can see or the heart can lead.

In this universe of gray and gold, of so much beauty and the occasional folly, it is Romain Duris who plays the part of Pierre, a sickly god confined to his unkempt fifth floor apartment near Père Lachaise Cemetery.

Duris, who appears here in his sixth Klapisch film, is a Moulin Rouge dancer who has been diagnosed with a hole in his heart.

Without a heart transplant he will die, and since he has not even the strength to walk up and down the stairs in his own building, he is relegated to looking down from his balcony and imagining stories about the people he sees below.

And what stories – invented or otherwise – they are.

Fabrice Luchini plays Roland, a middle-aged Sorbonne history professor who knows everything about the city yet little about how to coax one of its female inhabitants into his arms.

With endearing awkwardness he wins not only the attentions of his student Laetitia, played alluringly by Mélanie Laurent (Je Vais Bien, Ne t’en Fais Pas), but the hearts of the audience.

Only an actor of Luchini’s range could quote Baudelaire in one scene, and outrageously lip-sync to Wilson Pickett’s “Land of a Thousand Dances” in another.

François Cluzet (Ne le Dis à Personne) plays Philippe, Roland’s architect brother, in charge of building the new Paris.

A character like Philippe could have been a throwaway, one only there to show contrast with the more principal personage, in this case that of Luchini’s Roland.

However, Cluzet and Klapisch combine to bring depth and meaning to Philippe.

We see that although he seems to have it all (including a magnificent view of Paris from his ridiculously large balcony) he is just as neurotically plagued as his brother, and it is he who plays in the only dream sequence of the film (a Klapisch staple).

Other delicious turns in front of the camera are made by such cinematic stalwarts as Albert Dupontel, Karin Viard and Gilles Lellouche.

All these actors have enjoyed top billings in other films.

While someone’s name must come first (that goes to Binoche, with Duris and Luchini following), the fact is that this French all-star team works so well together because of Klapisch as coach.

And that too is the theme of Paris, city and film: there’s a lot of talent here, found in ordinary people doing everyday things.

People bake bread and tell lies and flirt over text messages and get jealous of their brother and dance one last dance and rejoice and mourn and live and die.

In Klapisch’s Paris, there is room for all those individuals doing ordinary things, in this crawling, sprawling city of gray roofs and gold domes and two towers – one loved, the other detested – rising up toward the heavens.

Read more of Stephen Leonard's views on Paris at http://www.thenervousbreakdown.com/r_kent/, where he writes under the name R Kent.