2 Dias em Paris

I watched 2 Days in Paris staring Julie Delpy and Adam Goldberg last night. I've never much cared for Adam Goldberg, and I spent my own 2 days in Paris in 2000 and it was the hardest 2 days on a relationship I've ever had. Maybe that's why this has become one of my favorite films of all time. Watching Adam Goldberg deal with some of the same foreign travel problems and relationship issues that torture him throughout this movie.

The movie is half in French. It is definitely to your advantage if you don't speak French, because a key plot element is how Jack (Adam Goldberg) becomes so regularly frustrated by not understanding the language.

In the end, I think I loved this movie because it is one of the best love stories I've ever seen. It's not a Hollywood fairytale romance, it's real, it's gritty, quirky, funny, and ugly, just like love can be in real life.

The culture-clash story might have been done before, but this is still a very refreshing and most of the time utterly hilarious movie. Myself and the rest of the theater burst out laughing every couple of minutes, which makes me forgive the few scenes that made me uncomfortable. Definitely not for the faint of heart or easily offended!

The characters might seem over the top at times, but they're still likable and real (as witnessed by the fact that the artwork in the gallery was actually made by Julie Delpy's father). I thought that Julie Delpy's parents stole the show whenever they were on screen, although Delpy and Goldberg both do a very good job.

All in all, it feels like a very personal look at French (or rather, Parisian bohemian) life, and very much worth a viewing. Or even two.

It's a pretty small sub-genre of films, in which Julie Delpy plays an irritating European, wandering round a European city in the company of an even more annoying American. But Delpy, who starred in Richard Linklater's 'Before Sunrise' and its sequel, has now made a film of her own in a similar mould. Fortunately, it's not as self-regarding as Linklater's films, but it isn't funny enough to really work as a comedy, and if it's characters are a little less unlikeable, they're still not really interesting, being too self-consciously eccentric. Delpy tries to paint a picture of the reality of a mature relationship; but it doesn't really work when the protagonists have the emotional development of teenagers. I sincerely hope the genre goes no further than here.

I must say that this not a boring film at all, although I found the endless little quarrels a bit tiresome. It is hard, though, for a non-French person to judge just how much of all this is meant to portray the character of "the French" (if anything like that exists) and how much is mere parody exploiting and playing with the cliché that French people always think about love and sex. For example, is Marion's father supposed to be a prototype or simply a caricature? Knowing this would be of great help in evaluating this movie.

On the other hand, the film is very balanced in its attempt to weigh Marion's delight in experiment against Jack's conservative rationalism with regard to relationships. In other respects, of course, Jack is not rational at all, for example concerning his hypochondria. Whether one wants to call him touchy and easily offended will probably also depend on whether you think that, in the first place, he is being treated badly by all those slightly crazy Parisians or whether you would rather want to say that he is a bit stiff and inhibited.

In any case, this is a nice little film about the difficult task to lead a cross-national relationship and about the fact that thinking you know your partner is not the same as knowing her or his culture.

But don't expect to see a romance like in "Before Sunrise"!!

This is a somewhat romantic comedy about a french-American couple spending two turbulent days living with her parents in Paris.

My expectations were fairly low when I was coerced into watching Julie Delpy's directorial debut. After the first couple of minutes (and arguments between Delpy and Goldberg, respectively) I was still skeptical. But by the time her (real life, by the way) parents were introduced, things got really hysterical and I was holding my sides laughing throughout the rest of the movie. It has to be said that most of the jokes are sexual in nature, so this is no film for the young or easily offended. There are also moments where Delpys character is a little annoying, but those are thankfully far and few between. Similarly, I approved the brevity of Daniel Brühls appearance. Special mention has to go to Adam Goldberg, however, whose antics lend the movie the lion's share of its funny moments - I certainly hope to see more of him in the future.