Sous le ciel de Paris

"Sous Le Ciel De Paris" is uneven, episodic, unfocused, but also pioneering: it can be taken as a precursor of both the New Wave movement (it has an improvisational, let's-take-the-camera-out-and-start-filming-and-we'll-see-what-happens style), and of much later "mosaic" urban films such as Robert Altman's "Short Cuts". Its main problem is that most of the individual stories fail to captivate, until they start merging together near the end; the one highlight until then is the brilliantly edited exam sequence. The last section contains some startling surprises, so the film is worth sticking with through some of its early rough patches. **1/2 out of 4.