"Avenue Montaigne," a delicately charming fable set in Paris, offers the kind of experience we secretly crave when we visit any great city: meaningful encounters with its people. Like the best movies inextricably linked to the cities in which they are set -- Woody Allen's New York comedies, for instance, or Pedro Almodovar's Madrid-based soap operas -- "Avenue Montaigne" transforms an overwhelming metropolis into a user-friendly village with quirkily appealing characters.

At the center is Jessica (an impishly radiant Cecile De France), a sweethearted gamin from the provinces who has just arrived in the capital. To this country girl, Paris is the city of luxury, a picture-postcard world of hotels, expensive restaurants and fine living. And she wants in.

When she gets a job waiting tables on the chic Avenue Montaigne, she gets her wish. Jessica's unabashed reverence for her clientele soon endears her to everyone except -- this being Paris -- the maitre d'. Among the charmed are Jean-Francois (Albert Dupontel), a classical pianist who sees Jessica as a member of the unsnobbish audience he wishes he could reach, and Jacques Grumberg (Claude Brasseur), an aging businessman whose dwindling resources have forced him to sell the art collection of a lifetime.

French director and co-writer Daniele Thompson, as she did with her 2002 airport romance, "Jet Lag," traces the serendipitous forces that draw people together. Watching "Avenue," we're caught up in the allure of chance meetings, fateful changes of plan and coincidence. There's an implied magic, brought about by the enchanting atmosphere of Paris and the effect Jessica seems to have on everybody. She's the Tinker Bell of this story. As people believe in her unvarnished purity, their lives are subtly transformed.

This vicarious sojourn in Paris leaves us with souvenirs that few real trips could ever produce: a sense of the ebb and flow of Parisian living and the way that life, love and art can flow together in one rather wonderful collective stream.

-- Desson Thomson (March 2, 2007)

Contains profanity and sexual situations. In French and English with subtitles.