Cedric Klapisch

"When the Cat's Away" is a bit of close-up magic, graceful enough to make something out of nothing. Small and intimate, it expands from its slight romantic comic premise to deal playfully with loneliness and love, providing a wry mash note to the city of Paris along the way. Not the tourist Paris we usually see, but the workaday metropolis, specifically the neighborhood in transition that is the Bastille district.

For French auteur Cédric Klapisch ("When the Cat's Away . . .," "L'Auberge espagnole") the success or failure of his new film, "Paris," came down to a question of real estate. To make his love letter to the City of Light work, Klapisch had to find just the right apartment -- with a balcony, of course -- where his protagonist, a dancer named Pierre (Romain Duris, in his sixth film with the director) could watch working-class denizens go about their daily lives. Klapisch found his ideal flat "very close to the Père-Lachaise Cemetery," says the 48-year-old filmmaker on the phone from New York City.

"When the Cat's Away," which catches us up into a multicultural world of a vibrant, ever-changing Paris neighborhood, brings to attention its talented 35-year-old writer-director, Cedric Klapisch. A lifelong Parisian himself, Klapisch attended New York University's prestigious film school.

"When the Cat's Away," which catches us up into a multicultural world of a vibrant, ever-changing Paris neighborhood, brings to attention its talented 35-year-old writer-director, Cedric Klapisch. A lifelong Parisian himself, Klapisch attended New York University's prestigious film school.

For French auteur Cédric Klapisch ("When the Cat's Away . . .," "L'Auberge espagnole") the success or failure of his new film, "Paris," came down to a question of real estate. To make his love letter to the City of Light work, Klapisch had to find just the right apartment -- with a balcony, of course -- where his protagonist, a dancer named Pierre (Romain Duris, in his sixth film with the director) could watch working-class denizens go about their daily lives. Klapisch found his ideal flat "very close to the Père-Lachaise Cemetery," says the 48-year-old filmmaker on the phone from New York City.

"Ah, Monsieur Rabelais," an admirer said to the 16th century French writer in a memorable New Yorker cartoon, "there is simply no word to describe your lusty, bawdy sense of humor." Similarly, there is no one word (and it probably wouldn't be "Rabelaisian") to describe the kind of uproarious, quintessentially French verbal farce that is "Un Air de Famille."

MOVIES Football player-turned-actor Howie Long plays a "smoke-jumper" who has to battle two forest fires and outwit a homicidal escaped convict in cinematographer-turned-director Dean Sempler's "Firestorm." Talk about your tough days. The film opens Friday in general release. THEATER Richard Dreyfuss headlines as Benedict Arnold in L.A. Theatre Works' radio theater staging of "The General From America," by Richard Nelson.

When we last saw Xavier (Romain Duris), he was fleeing the security of a government job as fast as his legs would carry him. That was at the end of Cedric Klapisch's "L'Auberge Espagnole," a quirkily romantic bildungs-movie that put a klatch of cute faces on the European Union, qua flat-sharing Erasmus students in Barcelona. You don't need to have seen "L'Auberge Espagnole" to enjoy "Russian Dolls," but as a mood-setter, it helps.

"L'auberge espagnole" literally translates as the Spanish inn, but it's also a French expression for a place where cultures are mixed together like a stew. In both meanings, it is a perfect title for French writer-director Cedric Klapisch's exhilarating comedy, for it is set in a cramped old Barcelona apartment that is home to seven foreign exchange students, each from a different country.

With the warm, joyous "Gadjo Dilo," Algerian-born French filmmaker-composer Tony Gatlif completes his beguiling Gypsy triptych.

"When the Cat's Away" is a bit of close-up magic, graceful enough to make something out of nothing. Small and intimate, it expands from its slight romantic comic premise to deal playfully with loneliness and love, providing a wry mash note to the city of Paris along the way. Not the tourist Paris we usually see, but the workaday metropolis, specifically the neighborhood in transition that is the Bastille district.

Those passionate about ballet will need no encouragement to experience the new documentary "Ballerina," and those who don't care will be tempted to change their minds should they see it. As the lyric from "A Chorus Line" insists, "everyone is beautiful at the ballet," and this film is dedicated to proving that point. Directed and in large part shot by Bertrand Normand with a digital Betacam, "Ballerina" is not a tell-all documentary that reveals hidden conflicts or unbridgeable chasms.

In less than a decade, Cedric Klapisch has emerged as one of France's most accomplished writer-directors, a filmmaker whose works are as intelligent and graceful as they are entertaining. "When the Cat's Away ... " (1997), his third feature and the first to get a U.S. release, was a charmer about a young woman who entrusts her pet to a neighbor, only to have it run away. Next came "Un Air de Famille," a deft stage adaptation in which a volatile family gathering turns hilarious.