Trashing the hometown, for fun

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. Nonetheless it has done quite well critically in France, where Nelly Kaprièlian of the hip journal Les Inrockuptibles said it's "fresh as early Jarmusch, crossed with Woody Allen, and contains some sequences already destined to become classic."

_________________
©Chris Knipp. Blog: http://chrisknipp.blogspot.com/.