Paris does not see much snow, and one wonders why the City of Light is snowbound in Alain Resnais’ last year’s New York Film Festival entry, Private Fears in Public Places/Coeurs. Or why windows or doors showcase fat flakes and most of the fifty-odd scenes blend into one another through falling white, or a pivotal talk at a household table morphs to a bare stage with a table magically sheltered from the heavy white stuff.

The snowscreen is not likely an indication of a not particularly white London, either, the original site in the Alan Ayckbourn theater play screenplayed here by also theater-oriented Jean-Michel Ribes. Aside from a blanching of the outdoors, thus to concentrate on interior, often one smallish room spaces in this film that is not all that distant from live stage, there may be no reason. Similarly, views through window-, door- or patterned partition-glass may be for nothing more than pretentious style, unobjectionable in itself and perhaps again to focus on a reduced area, just like the corny overheads of rooms with their roofs removed.

Different from the director’s trademark obsession with ambiguities of plot, time and memory, the film is transparent enough in comparison. Urban in locale, specifically the upscaling district around the new Bibliothèque Nationale, the story is, in fact, modern in treating the current malaise of loneliness, a result of compartmentalization in this era of collapsed traditional bonds of family, church and hierarchy.

Limited action spreading out from a two-man real estate branch office, this is not the typical celebration of the Paris that, in Cole Porter, one loves because my love is here (and where it drizzles, not snows, in winter). Seeking love, yes, or at least relationship, five of the six characters come up empty-handed. Press blurbs speak of “warm-hearted comedy,” but that is imaginable only in the sense that, although the unseen seventh (voice of Claude Rich, as Arthur) is hospitalized and dying from over-excitement, no one physically dies. Sadness of unfulfilled empty lives, however, pervades everything.

Everything, that is, except the machinations of properties broker Charlotte (Sabine Azéma), a slim redheaded purveyor of Protestantism, religious-music TV programs, hellfire within, and forgiveness. Her motivations remain murky, though such libido-hiding zealots have not infrequently been portrayed, for the program cassette she offers coworker Thierry (André Dussollier), and which he accepts out of politesse, dissolves into static and then a headless panting striptease routine that he is intended to take as hers. Turned on, assuming that it and a second tape are come-ons, the pathetic bachelor watches in secret, lest blonde younger sister Gaëlle (Isabelle Carré) catch him.

Catch him at it she does, and recoils.Responding to lovelorn ads, Gaëlle waits, disappointed and wearing an identifying flower, in the Café Dézic. She waits, until one day handsome ex-soldier Dan (Lambert Wilson) does show up to sweep her off her feet. Giving her name out as Sophia and ordering the rare lethal concoction Devil’s Tail, she soon stands revealed as a suppressed lush hungry for love; Dan, who presents himself as Martin, has already been shown as a feckless alcoholic with father issues and the long-time boyfriend and now flatmate of brunette Nicole (Laura Morante). Their relationship strained by his joblessness in the face of her seriousness, Nicole and Dan have been flat-hunting through Thierry, but both independently resolve to separate for a while to short things, and themselves, out.

Dan’s decision to play the field temporarily had been spurred by advice from dignified Lionel (Pierre Arditi), barman at the posh hotel into which Dan moves. Carrying emotional baggage from relationships with his separated parents, and the death of a friend glimpsed in a photograph, Lionel laments his mother’s painful death and has trouble getting care for obscene father Arthur. Inexplicably moonlighting, Charlotte proves the answer: after enduring the old man’s tantrums, she secretly arrives with scanties to bump-and-grind the invalid into excited collapse and, back in the everpresent prim skirt and sleeveless slipover, to listen to Lionel’s confession of guilt feelings, encourage resistance against the Devil’s blandishments, and offer a “helpful” video recording of weekly religious-music television.

She is the center, the most interesting of these characters. True, sad and realistically bland, the five others are victims, of life and of themselves. Perversely, she alone achieves, moves things, is fulfilled. What, indeed, can Resnais be saying about the rest of us in these unforced interlocking pieces?

(Released by IFC First Take; not rated by MPAA.)