WHEN THE CAT'S AWAY (75)

Directed by: Cedric Klapisch

Starring: Garence Clavel, Zinedine Soualem, Olivier Py

The Pitch: The denizens of a Parisian neighbourhood help (or, more often, don't help) a timid girl to find her missing cat.

Theo Sez: In the future all movies will probably look something like this, a fusion of moods and characters as eclectic as its soundtrack - rap and techno side by side with guitar ballads, trip-hop (Portishead, yet again!) next to traditional Parisian singalongs. The French title, CHACUN CHERCHE SON CHAT ("Everyone's Looking For Their Cat"), exemplifies both the spirit of generous humanism and, in its playful tongue-twistery (try saying it out loud), the party mood - a warm restlessness - that pervades the whole movie : both of them basically come down to the same thing, namely that it's interested in everyone, shuffling characters, cultures and languages - bits of English and Arabic in with the French - full of chance meetings and non sequiturs. Inevitably it runs out of steam occasionally, and there's a slight preciousness to its whimsical notions of a vanishing community made up of cat-lovers and dotty old ladies - it makes you want to yell out snide remarks about the plausibility gap between these folks and real-life Parisians. What's treasurable is the melancholy edge behind the cuteness, the fact that - unlike the warm and fuzzy SMOKE, which also had a lot of talk about neighbourhood and community - it's basically a film about being alone. Even its most perfect gag, and perhaps the loveliest moment in this year's movies - the condensation of the heroine's long-awaited holiday into a single five-second shot, one sigh of pleasure neck-deep in the sea then back to the city, exactly where we left her - both makes you smile and tugs at the heart a little, with its suggestion of no real relief from the urban grind. If nothing else it's the perfect film for France in the late 90s, fizzing with vital multiculturalism (and unsurprisingly, as the film makes clear, strongly opposed to Jacques Chirac and the elitist world he represents), but less positive underneath, a little depressed, a little rueful and uncertain about where it's going. Or should I have said the whole world in the late 90s?