User Reviews

This witty and touching film considers the difficulties of cross-cultural relationships, in this case a relationship between an American man and a French woman. While the film sometimes relies on stereotypes (particularly with some of the minor characters), it also presents rich, fleshed- out characters that are clearly individuals with their own histories and experiences that they and those around them have to contend with. The film does not spare either Americans or the French in its critical look at the two cultures and the ways they affect the interactions of the two main characters. Both Delpy and Goldberg deliver fine performances, and the script offers plenty of laughs.

If I were to give high praise to this film it is because it is so honest and raw, the characters are very real and complex with simple graces and flaws.

My biggest difficulty with this film is I didn't like either of the main characters very much. Julie Delpy's Marion often acts as the moral compass of the film despite turning a blind eye to acts of cruelty and vandalism. Adam Goldberg's Jack is immature, selfish and whiny. In many ways Goldberg's performance reminded me of Woody Allen. In his day Allen seemed Avant Garde, but for me the day of the neurotic self absorbed girly man is past and I found it most annoying.

The highlight of the film were Marion's parents, her father a cheerful man who eats rabbit heads, key's poorly parked cars and hate Jim Morrison seemed like a great deal of fun. Then there's her mother, former hippie who had an affair with Morrison (hence the fathers distaste) and was instrumental in the abortion movement now irons jeans.

The film had other problems, the introduction of a veggie-terrorist burning down fast food restaurants seems out of place. Also there are scenes when Marion talks over the action giving us explanation using what appear to be chalk drawings on the screen. There were 2 such sequences which appeared fairly late in the film and only used twice, it seemed out of place, schizophrenic even. I'd have preferred they use this convention earlier and at least 3 times to generate that we're seeing this from Marion's point of view, to come up where it did and only used twice made it feel incomplete. Similar conventions have been used in other films such as Ferris Bueller's Day Off where the title character often addresses the audience. Marion does narrate the film but initially does so as subtext rather than for the purpose of instruction.

I suppose you might call this an art film, it surely seemed like many of the films I saw in my film classes in college and it may take a certain high brow level of sophistication that I have not yet attained. On the other hand it could be just some self involved dribble so typical of films in the genre. Either way I'm glad it wasn't expensive to watch.

As the movie opens Jack (Adam Goldberg) is waiting for a taxi, and a bunch of fat, slovenly-looking American tourists are in the line in front of him. One asks his directions to the Louvre. She confides that the French are snooty, and she's glad to have found a fellow countryman to help her group. Jack says the museum is too close to ride and gives directions how to walk there--thus putting himself first in line for a cab. Later he admits to Marion (Julie Delpy) that he made up the directions just to get rid of them, and who cares? They were wearing pro-Bush T-shirts. No doubt this mocks Americans, but to what end? And what kind of a guy is Jack, to pull such a mean stunt? Neither he nor Marion is an appealing character, and when at the end Marion's voice-over tells us Jack has realized they don't really know each other, we realize we don't know them either.

Partly inspired by her improvisational collaborations with Richard Linklater in 'Before Sunrise' and 'Before Sunset,' Julie Delpy, with this directorial debut, has packed in an immense amount of conversation. The fur and the obscenities fly--at such a rate that as the final credits roll it feels as if everything and everyone in sight has been trashed in the heedless onrush of provocations and offhand jokes--a few of which are actually funny. '2 Days in Paris' is witty and destructive, but not altogether successful. It's been referred to, not without some justification, as a vanity film. It has a thrown-together quality. What saves it precariously from failure is the fact that its conversations are so specific some of them may stick in your mind. As a statement about cultural interchange (clearly one of its main topics), however, it is at best puzzling. This boy-girl relationship is too superficial to be worth exploring. They might have met last week, instead of two years ago.

Marion, like Delpy, is a woman fluent in French and English, and her boyfriend Jack knows only a few standard French phrases. Delpy's real mom and dad, Marie Pillet and Albert Delpy, costar as her on-screen parents; they're quite charming in a somewhat stereotypical, stage-French sort of way. The premise is that Marion and Jack stop over in her hometown of Paris after a holiday in Venice to stay with her parents, whom Jack has never met, and pick up her cat. Jack is an interior designer (a credential never explored or justified) and Marion is a photographer--but he's the one who's taking all the pictures at the moment (a plethora of flashed stills, including several of naked men with balloons tied to their penises, are little more than filler). Nothing much really happens, but Jack, a hypochondriac, is forced to meet another one of Marion's ex-lovers every few minutes, she is blossoming into a rage-aholic, and every other taxi driver turns out to be a racist or a flirt. The two lovers, whose attempts to make love have been failing, have a fight, make up, and go to a dance bar. The End.

Everyone jumps into instant intimacy with Marion, and Jack can't understand any of what's said unless Marion translates.

Delpy combines the cozy and the mildly disgusting seamlessly in a scene at the parents' dinner table when pieces of cooked rabbit are being passed around, with Rose (Alexia Landeau), Marion's sister, also present, and it's funny how the French goes over Jack's head though he still gets involved using his few French phrases. The potty talk, the sex talk, all that: are they meant to be funny, or to have an edge? One trouble is simply that a movie in which the talk is supreme needs to allow space around the conversations, as in Linklater's or Eric Rohmer's work; but Delpy mixes in so many minor characters and quick scene changes that everything gets mashed together. One of the things that disappears is a coherent point of view, despite Delpy's voice-overs. This movie pales in comparison with the work of the old French master and the versatile American upstart. Most of the French people in 2 Days talk about things that would be gross to a prude. Is Delpy mocking the French, or just American stereotypes of them? This is the trouble: the wit is so mordant and spatter-shot that points get lost and cancel each other out.

Old boyfriends keep popping up. Is Marion a "slut," or is it just that the French like to joke around about sex and talk explicitly? And then there's Marion's habit of going off on people, including cabbies whose talk annoys her, and one more ex- met in a restaurant who ran off and made love with young girls in Thailand. The trouble is Marion's anger seems mechanical; purely verbal, almost random. It brings to mind Capote's put-down of 'On the Road:' "that isn't writing; it's typing." One's tempted to say "this isn't acting; it's talking." And though Goldberg may be an actor good at playing neurotic characters, he doesn't get enough time to show his neuroses here. We get a lot of views of his bearded face, his muscular chest, and his tattoos, but we are not granted the slightest glance into his soul. Somewhere in the phantom background Woody Allen hovers, pleading for a re-write and re-shoot. And maybe Ethan Hawke is waiting around a corner too, ready for one last romantic conversation. But it doesn't seem like this lady is going to let him get a word in edgewise. She's become a motor-mouth in two languages.

Roger Ebert has called this "a smart film with an edge to it." It is smart and it does have an edge. But it's too disorganized and random and its action too desultory for the whole to be as good as a few of its parts.

I found the depiction of this relationship appalling. I may show it to my teenage sons so they recognize what emotional abuse looks and sounds like. Nothing about the female lead character is endearing. She excludes her partner, makes him look and feel ridiculous, lies to him and is frankly very mentally ill. Her issues were not little insecurities that he should learn to live with and love. They were catastrophic and destructive. I watched it to the end to see if she might redeem herself, and she sort of did, gaining some insight into her own behaviour. However, if she truly loved this man, she should have undergone a couple years of intensive therapy before even thinking of beginning a relationship. Movies like this trivialize the seriousness of this type of behaviour. I did not like the happy ending; that kind of irrational behaviour does not just go away and leave the one who bears the brunt of it to live happily ever after.

Director Richard Linklater shared writing credits on "Before Sunset" and "Before Sunrise" with Julie Delpy and Ethan Hawke, the actors who played the couple at the heart of his two romantic masterpieces.

Flash forward several years and we have Julie Delpy starring in, writing, directing and scoring "Two Days In Paris", an unofficial sequel to Linklater's films.

Utilizing Linklater's "walk and talk" technique, the film replicates Linklater's story about a European girl and an American guy sharing intimate moments whilst on a holiday in Europe. She's a Parisian and he's a New Yorker, and as they spend a weekend in her home town we eavesdrop on their conversations, listen to their anxieties and chuckle at some moments of light culture clash comedy.

Linklater's duology primarily appealed to young males, but Delpy's, despite utilising a similar style and structure, is a distinctly female thing (on IMDb, females also rank this film higher than males). Her character, with black-rimmed geek glasses and a personality akin to a semi-neurotic or hypochondriac, is your artist's typical self-depreciating view of him/herself. In contrast, her love interest is a gorgeous but sensitive stud, who gets his penis out on screen for the audience. He is squarely the tale's object of affection, whom Delpy punishes herself for not deserving.

And so eventually our couple begin to grow apart. Delpy throws in much castration symbolism (a photo in which soaring balloons are mirrored to flaccid genitals being the most obvious one) and subplots about performance anxiety, but it is not her partner who cannot perform, but she who desires to make him anxious. Scarred by previous relationships she retreats from commitment and sabotages her chance for love.

Beyond the romance, the film delights in poking fun at both Americans and French. The various tourists and characters whom our couple meet whilst on their holiday convey the impression that all Americans are ignorant and repressed whilst all French are racist snobs. But the private behaviour of our couple cast a complex light on these issues. He may be repressed, but he's trustworthy and longs for commitment. She may be your typical liberated, bourgeois artist, but her inhibitions stem from deep scars.

The film is too clumsy and too reliant on gross out humour to compete with Linklater's sensitive romances (and the films of Eric Rohmer, whom Linklater seems influenced by), and its final act doesn't resonate as well as it should, but "2 Days In Paris" is nevertheless an excellent film, featuring two well written characters who speak with refreshing frankness.

8/10 – Worth one viewing. Makes a good companion piece to the romances of Linklater, Cassavetes, Rohmer and countless equally good indie romances like "A Little Stiff", "In The City of Sylvia", "All The Real Girls", "In Search of a Midnight Kiss", "Say Anything", "Keith" etc.