Shirtless in Iceland is a stylish, urban-hip story of love and death, friendship and enmity. Centered around two weeks in the lives of city-weary Parisian friends of various nationalities, it attends to Michael Simkins' observation that, "Paris is a place in which we can forget ourselves, reinvent, expunge the dead weight of our past." For all of these twenty-something expatriates and natives who meet restlessly every night, Paris is work, conflict, traffic, commuter trains, love lost and found, and too-busy lives filled with anxious anticipation of a future they cannot envision, longing for fulfillment and happiness. Paris is the backdrop for the great tragedy in their lives, and it takes a tragedy to bring them meaning, and make them reconsider all of their situations, domestic and otherwise.