Running time: 120 minutes . . . .

A BURST of fireworks over the Eiffel Tower splits the screen into several sections, on each of which separate love stories are unravelling in different arondissements of Paris.

Together they evoke a portrait of the French capital as the city of romance, a cliche of course, but who cares if it stimulates such a shrewdly chosen collection of filmmakers to dream up so many nuggets. The concept, as laid down by producers Claude Ossard and Emmanuel Benbihy, gave 20 directors . . . reduced to 18 in the editing . . . five minutes each to tell their story.

So zoom in on writer-director Bruno Podalydes caught in a traffic jam, desperately looking for a parking spot. Just when he succeeds, a beautiful woman faints on the pavement beside his car. This is a Paris where . . .

courtesy of Isabel Coixet . . . a cowboy can materialise on horseback to provide closure to a grieving mother or Oscar Wilde can step out of his grave at Pere Lachaise to make a squabbling couple see sense . . . a disappointingly soppy contribution from horror maestro Wes Craven. It's left to Vincenzo Natali to conjure up a genuine gothic thrill by having Elijah Wood fatally seduced by a vampiress on a bridge in the 8th arondissement.

Paris, je t'aime is not all fluff.

Some of the directors have more on their minds than love. Walter Salles and Daniela Thomas follow a young immigrant mother, Catalina Sandina Moreno, on the crowded metro across Paris from the creche where she parts with her baby early every morning to the chic apartment where she spends the day caring for someone else's baby. South African director Oliver Schmitz focuses on a love that might have been as a black nurse comforts a Nigerian busker stabbed by racist hooligans. A similar encounter has a happier outcome with Gurinder Chada when a hijab-wearing woman, foot-tripped by a couple of men, is helped to her feet by a student, who then follows her back to her local mosque and waits hopefully when she comes out from class.

Alfonso Cuaron amusingly tricks us into mistaking Nick Nolte for a sugar daddy trying to seduce a young girl. Richard LaGravanese follows jaded Bob Hoskins and Fanny Ardant into a sex club in Pigalle where they resort to voyeurism to reignite their jaded passion. Gus Van Sant captures the first tentative moments of a homosexual affair.

While Sylvain Chomet's mimed live-action romance would have been better as animation and Tom Tykwer tries to fit too much into too little time when Natalie Portman breaks with her blind boyfriend . . . and Christopher Doyle's fantasy contribution is quickly forgotten . . . the surprise of Paris, je t'aime is that so many of the stories are so good.

Oliver Assayas eavesdrops on Maggie Gyllenhaal as a Hollywood actress looking for a cocaine fix but hoping for love while on location. The Coen brothers give Steve Buscemi a guide book and involve him in a lover's tiff on a Metro platform.

Best of all are Alexander Payne's take on a lonely American tourist . . . Margo Martindale . . . describing in pidgin French voiceover an account of how she fell in love with Paris, and the reunion of Ben Gazzara and Gena Rowlands . . . contrived by Frederic Auburtin and Gerald Depardieu . . . as an elderly couple meeting in a bistro to discuss their divorce.

Paris, je t'aime works beautifully as an impressionistic mosaic of fleeting moments of love, found and lost, through which we experience an exhilarating sense of Paris. It is also a homage to the much-neglected art of short films and the ability of cinema to say so much in a mere five minutes.