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2 DAYS IN PARIS
Music, Edited, Written & Directed by: Julie Delpy.
Produced by: Christophe Mazodier, Delpy & Thierry Potok.
Director of Photography: Lubomir Bakchev.
Released by: Samuel Goldwyn Pictures/Red Envelope Entertainment.
Language: English & French with English subtitles.
Country of Origin: France/Germany. 94 min. Rated R.
With: Julie Delpy, Adam Goldberg, Marie Pillet & Albert Delpy.

Julie Delpy has been a successful actress and an Oscar-nominated screenwriter (Before Sunset), but it has taken 20 years for her to realize her directing vision. It was not easy as she recounted in an Associated Press article. She literally “tricked her financiers into thinking she was making a romantic comedy about a French woman (herself) and an American man (Adam Goldberg).”

Here, she not only directs but also wrote the script, edited the film and composed the music. In the broadest sense, 2 Days in Paris is a romantic comedy heavy on the comedy and light on the romance, and that was a smart idea. Delpy, being the indie actress she is, was not interested in making a typical Hollywood romantic comedy. The good news: the film is a resounding success, so funny that I laughed out loud many times.

Delpy and Goldberg play lovers Marion and Jack who, on the way back from a not-so-great week in Venice, make a two-day pit stop in Paris to see her family and pick up her cat. Family is the operative word here because Delpy employs both her mother and her father (Marie Pillet and Albert Delpy) as Marion’s parents.

Delpy’s humor is so smart. Her character, a photographer with a vision problem, misplaces her contacts and spends part of the film wearing huge glasses that take up her entire face, forcing us to look beyond her beauty. Delpy deliberately tries to keep her characters, and us, off-balance, deliberately sending up stereotypes of the sexually liberated French vs. the repressed Americans.

Marion is kind of flighty, and Jack is very uncomfortable both in his skin and in Europe, and descends quickly into behaving like a typical American tourist taking way too many pictures and wanting everything to be exactly as it is at home. They try to get their relationship back on track, attempting to have sex, but when he can’t get the French condom, left over in her Paris apartment, to stay on he moans, “Is this a kid’s size condom? Do they make condoms for kids?” The hilarious scene illuminates the crux of their problems – she’s not good at commitment and he’s extremely jealous.

Delpy has made a seamless transition to the directing chair. As a director, she’s interested in making action movies and thrillers and hopefully now that she has proved herself adept, she won’t have to be forced to lie to get financial backing. Sadly, her story’s probably more common than we would think – I wonder how many male directors had to jump through the same hoops?

Melissa Silverstein, a writer on women & popular culture and online editor for The Women's Media Center
August 10, 2007