Review: Delpy takes shots at France, America and love in '2 Days in Paris’ (B-)

Fresh-faced Gallic sweetheart Julie Delpy finally connects with her inner misanthrope in the doggedly nonromantic “2 Days in Paris.” With a light if relentlessly sardonic touch, Delpy — here serving as writer, director, star and nepotistic casting agent — oversees a laugh-out-loud pillory of France and America, man and woman, and storybook Parisian love.

Beware, these are difficult characters — so difficult that spending time with them makes your teeth hurt, at least at first. Delpy, in a slightly twisted approximation of her Ethan Hawke-loving backpacker in “Before Sunrise,” plays Marion, a 35-year-old French expat vacationing across Europe with her American interior designer boyfriend, Jack (Adam Goldberg from “Saving Private Ryan”). After a picture-perfect sojourn in Italy, the couple retires to Paris, where their relationship is rocked by her ex-boyfriends, his romantic insecurities, etc.

Delpy isn’t afraid to deploy stereotypes, a fact made torturously, interminably clear when Jack’s neurotic Jewish essence comes on like a dance number in “Fiddler on the Roof.” Huddled in Marion’s childhood bedroom, the couple embarks on what amounts to a bad Woody Allen routine, with Jack self-consciously fretting about mold in the bathroom and other hypochondriac hang-ups, and Marion playing the teasing, passive-aggressive enabler.

When the couple goes downstairs for dinner and Jack childishly pooh-poohs her father’s home-cooked meal of rabbit in wine sauce, “2 Days in Paris” starts to smack of — dare I say it? — latent anti-Semitism. Are we supposed to hate Jack? What’s the point of Marion’s family commenting on his swarthy looks? Or, for that matter, the conversation about eugenics and “genetic superiority”? Very odd.

Jack — and, by logical extension, the movie as a whole — is rescued by the fact that everybody in France is even crazier, ruder and more idiosyncratic than he. That goes for Marion’s car-vandalizing pere (played by Albert Delpy, the director’s real-life father) and her comically lachrymose mere (Marie Pillet, the director’s mother). Throw in a never-ending queue of sexually aggressive ex-beaus — who, to Jack’s consternation, try to seduce her in subtitled French — and Jack gracefully assumes the role of sympathetic straight man. (Save his first few scenes, Goldberg is comic gold.)

As a comparative cultural study, “2 Days in Paris” is beyond slanted — Americans are all elitist and right-wing philistines, and Frenchmen are all sex-mad swine and burger-hating terrorists. But in Delpy’s hilariously uncharitable vision, is there a hint of truth? Like Jack and Marion, the two cultures make for a strange, and strangely enduring, romance.

REVIEW | '2 Days in Paris’

Cast: Julie Delpy, Adam Goldberg, Albert Delpy, Marie Pillet

Behind the scenes: Written and directed by Julie Delpy

Rated: R (some nudity, profanity, sexual content), 96 minutes

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Grade: B-