The French new wave — the band of outsiders that included Jean-Luc Godard and François Truffaut — brought a new candor, spontaneity, and embrace of formal experimentation to international cinema in the early 1960s. Inevitably, it also created a generation of French-film clichés. At times, Christophe Honoré’s fashionable and cynical “Dans Paris,” which makes its premiere at the IFC Center today, seems to be doing its best to cram them all into one movie.

After a nasty separation from his wife, suicidally depressed Paul (Romain Duris) moves in with his father (Guy Marchand) and brother Jonathan (Louis Garrel), a footloose university student who laughs at his own farts and skips school in favor of seducing girls in the streets of Paris. Most of the film takes place during the course of a single day, December 23, in a cramped apartment, with the tight quarters and Paul’s wintry mood casting shadows over the Christmas backdrop.

Temperamentally, Paul and Jonathan could hardly be more different, and the question of why this is dogs the entire film. Mention is made of a family tragedy, and Paul floats the hypothesis that unhappiness is a genetic inheritance, “like the color of our eyes.” Otherwise “Dans Paris” doesn’t make much of the unlikely fraternal contrast at its center. Instead, it uses Jonathan’s sexual escapades — there’s a woman on a scooter, an ex-girlfriend, and a blonde beauty standing in front of a shop window — to clear the air of Paul’s oppressive relationship woes. The polar-opposite setup may initially keep viewers interested, but in the end it’s a clumsily literal interpretation of the new wave’s divergent impulses.

This Truffaut-indebted tale is full of déjà vu moments: the bedroom scenes, the spontaneous seductions, the angsty drags on cigarettes, the jazz score that accompanies Jonathan through Paris. Even Paul’s wife’s (Joana Preiss) caustic commentary on the stink of sex, meant to be provocative, sounds tired and familiar. Mr. Garrel’s lothario has a strong physical resemblance to the mischievous romantics Jean-Pierre Léaud played for Truffaut, but none of the vulnerability that made them so endearing.

The actors generally play well off one another, but they’re limited by the film’s sour portrait of intimacy, best summed up in a scene in which Jonathan snaps at his father and sticks his head under a pillow. Everyone, in fact, treats Mr. Marchand’s addled old man — the film’s only sympathetic character — like a nuisance. His exwife (Marie-France Pisier) left him, apparently because she found someone richer. C’est la vie.