Now that we’ve all been self-isolating and socially distancing for 68 months (note: I may have lost track of the exact number), 2 Days In Paris seems so fantastical that it might as well be Guardians of the Galaxy. Just imagine: the characters stroll around a busy metropolis! They pop into cafes and galleries! They have lunch with elderly relatives and slump onto sofas at crowded parties! And look at all that Gallic cheek-kissing! Settle down in front of Julie Delpy’s wonderfully spiky comedy drama from 2007 and you’ll see how liberating it’s going to be to live that life again. On the other hand, you’ll see how annoying that life can be, too.
The film was Delpy’s second as a writer-director. She’d also co-written the Oscar-nominated Before Sunset screenplay, and 2 Days In Paris is almost a bonus entry in the Before series, in that Delpy and a beardy American do lots of walking and talking in a European tourist hotspot. But in Before Sunrise and Before Sunset (not so much Before Midnight), it’s clear that the walk-and-talkers are made for each other. In Delpy’s looser, earthier, funnier companion piece, the question is whether anyone is really made for anyone else, or whether there will always be a wall of past romances, small secrets and cultural differences between us.
Delpy plays Marion, a photographer who has been living in New York with her boyfriend Jack (Adam Goldberg) for two years. They’re about to fly home after a holiday in Venice, but before they go, they spend a weekend in the City of Light with Marion’s bohemian parents (played by Delpy’s real parents, Albert Delpy and Marie Pillet), who live in the flat below Marion’s own cluttered pied-a-terre.
Sounds idyllic, non? But you have to take into account the hangovers, the queues, and the weirdos who stand too close to you on the underground. Besides, Marion’s family and friends are so cheerfully rude to Jack that he is essentially trapped in a low-key remake of Meet the Parents: Delpy Sr may not be quite as intimidating as Robert De Niro, but he does key any cars he sees parked on the pavement, so he’s not the most promising of prospective father-in-laws. A more helpful comparison, though, might be with Woody Allen’s comedies. Jack is a dead ringer for Alvy from Annie Hall, except with copious tattoos and cigarettes: he is a neurotic hypochondriac who panics about the mould on the bathroom wall, but who has a perfect one-liner for every occasion. Marion, meanwhile, could be related to Annie, and not just because of her photography. When Jack’s kvetching makes her break into giggles, they share the kind of chemistry and apparent spontaneity that have rarely been seen onscreen since Annie and Alvy were corralling runaway lobsters together.
A less Allen-esque aspect of the film is its depiction of the French capital. While Midnight In Paris “idolized it all out of proportion”, to quote the opening monologue from Manhattan, Delpy views the grey-skied sprawl from the perspective of a jaded local. No one gawps at the Eiffel Tower or the sparkling Seine. The nearest Jack and Marion get to conventional sightseeing is a trip to Père Lachaise, and the reason they enjoy that, they joke, is that all the Parisians in the area are dead.
For Marion, Paris is a nest of racist and lecherous taxi drivers. For Jack, it’s a hostile alien planet where a market stall-holder brandishes a freshly butchered piglet (“Look what the French did to Babe,” he moans), and where everyone insists on discussing sex – especially the sex they’ve had with Marion. If the parade of lascivious ex-boyfriends weren’t aggravating enough, there are the ever-present worries about George Bush’s presidency, the war in Iraq, avian flu, and the mind-boggling popularity of Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code. Even before the world grew as dark as it is today, 2 Days In Paris reminds us, la vie wasn’t necessarily en rose.
As hilarious as it is – and Delpy manages to cram it with sharp verbal gags in two different languages – the film teaches us another lesson, too: you can be staying in a beautiful city with the person you love, and still have an exhaustingly miserable time. But, let’s be honest, what wouldn’t we give to have an exhaustingly miserable time like that right now?
2 Days In Paris is available on Amazon Prime in the US and UK
