2 Days in Paris (Red Envelope Entertainment/Samuel Goldwyn, R)

Here, Delpy's the half of the romantic duo that holds all the self-confidence; her Marion is considerably more self-assured than her Céline.

 

 

 

 

 

Who knew Julie Delpy was the new Vincent Gallo? Now, don't get your hopes up that Chloë Sevigny shows up late in 2 Days in Paris to give Ms. Delpy unsimulated oral sex. Instead, Delpy takes full control of her film, acting, and, well, just about everything except cinematographer… but you know she would have done that too, if she could have. Additionally, 2 Days in Paris succumbs to some of the same pitfalls as Gallo's The Brown Bunny. It's one thing to want total control of your art, but it's quite another to allow your art to become a visual representation of one's own masturbation (the pun is not intended in the case of Gallo). It's easy to buy Delpy as the French intellectual, spending her screen time dissecting relationships and global politics; after all, she plays a variation on her Céline of Richard Linklater's Before Sunrise and Sunset here (she also co-wrote with Linklater and Ethan Hawke the screenplay for the latter). For as charming as she might be, it's far more of a stretch for us, the audience, to buy her as what seems to be the most desirable woman in all of Paris.

It'd be easy to call 2 Days in Paris the film Before Sunset would have been had Delpy been given total control (or, along with Zoe Cassavetes' Broken English and Paris je t'aime, 2007's unofficial displaced-in-the-City-of-Lights trilogy). Here, Delpy's the half of the romantic duo that holds all the self-confidence; her Marion is considerably more self-assured than her Céline. As the other half, Adam Goldberg (your go-to neurotic Heeb) is Jack, a tattooed, overanxious American Jew who's just spent a lousy Venetian getaway with Marion, his girlfriend of nearly two years. The two drop anchor in Paris to visit Marion's family (played not surprisingly, by Delpy's real life parental units), which allows Marion a chance to further Jack's stereotypes of French people; in one scene, Marion embarrasses Jack by showing the family a Polaroid of him naked with a set of balloons floating from his member. Remember: Americans are sexually repressed hypochondriacs, and the French, well… they didn't coin the term laissez-faire for nothing. Marion and Jack appear to have formed their relationship based on a mutual hatred for George W. Bush and a desire to spend their waking hours chatting. As their Parisian "holiday" progresses, Jack becomes increasingly apprehensive, as it appears Marion has slept with (or at least almost slept with) just about every Parisian male they encounter (including Alejandro Jodorowsky's son Adan). He gets jealous and suspicious, but, as we're to understand of most Americans, bottles his feelings up for the final showdown between the two.

Delpy keeps the film engaging, thankfully, for if she hadn't, it might have been easier to blow the film off as Julie Delpy's love letter to… Julie Delpy. Though often purposefully meandering, there's a legitimate structure to the series of bantering. Marion and Jack's taxicab rides serve as the segue between scenes, each ride exposing an ugly facet of French culture: xenophobia, homophobia, classism, and unwarranted sexual advances. It, too, allows Delpy to wear her liberalism on her sleeve, with Jack, the non-French speaker, to sit back cluelessly. There's an effective poignancy to the conclusion of 2 Days in Paris in which hurtful revelations make for the transcendently bittersweet. Like The Brown Bunny, 2 Days in Paris never caves in on itself due to vanity (though both come achingly close at times), but it still makes us wish these filmmakers had checked their egoism at the door. | Joe Bowman