Two dazed in Paris

Two dazed in Paris

My first encounter with a French girl involved flowers which she wrongly interpreted as “flagrant.” Marion, played by Julie Delpy in the movie “2 Days in Paris,” does such things and she knows what she is doing. If their relationship is hitting rock bottom, then that means Marion will be there with her thimble and needle picking out the stitches. The film focuses on the last days of a European holiday trip that was meant to fix their love affair but it didn’t go well. Just sometimes when you really want to know your own self, you rather not.

Jack (Adam Goldberg) had a hard time in Venice. How can this be? Maybe it was Woody Allen who said his worst sexual experience was not so bad after all? So are lousy trips to Venice. Jack got severe diarrhea, and tried Marion’s patience by taking photos of everything except for his own diarrhea apparently. Has he never heard of Imodium that along with taxi and OK gets most Americans around the world? And did he think he was needed to remedy the world’s tragic shortage of photos of Venice?

But forget about it anyway! The two days that end their holiday are spent in Marion’s hometown, Paris before they go back home in New York City where they currently reside. They move into an apartment upstairs from Anna and Jeannot who are Marion’s parents (portrayed by Delpy’s real parents Marie Pillet and Albert Delpy). It starts at dinner first meal rabbit stew culture shock doesn’t spare even meals; i.e., do you think Anna or Jeannot could follow our American habit of mercifully calling it “chicken” besides rabbit head complete with its eyeballs certainly looks like a chicken full hormones.

Marion and Jack take a stroll through Paris while talking like every other couple does whenever they slightly irritate each other intentionally or unintentionally. No, this isn’t another version of Richard Linklater’s ‘Before Sunset’ (2004) where Ethan Hawke and Delpy take a walk in Paris talking. Its focus is on incompatibility as seen by Marion during her visit to Paris, what Jack has never really seen: Is she a radical political activist or simply an indiscriminate whore? She meets up with ex-boyfriends so frequently that it makes Paris look like small town by the way, one of them she beats up in a restaurant for having sex holidays in Thailand.

Back home, her father puts some questions to Jack about French culture while her mother is eager to wash and iron his clothes that he barely manages to slip out of them. Both of Delpy parents are professional performers only I hope they are acting. Apart from casting her parents, Delpy does several other things in this film such as starring, directing, writing, editing, co-producing and composing the score for the movie and singing a song. A man who takes on these many roles we call Orson Welles reincarnate but when women do so many things; why does it sound like vanity?

Delpy has in fact made a brilliant film that is sharp; then her Jack and Marion expose things about each other they never thought they would tell anyone, and we wonder why ever did they get to a second date. A lot has been said about the likeness between Delpy and Diane Keaton in “Annie Hall” but if there were a spider as big as a Buick on Delpy’s bathroom she’d braise it and serve it for lunch.

This is the same thing as saying that Julie Delpy is genuine, an independent woman who will not be pinned down or restricted. Her first major parts were in Bertrand Tavernier’s “Beatrice” (1987) Agnieszka Holland’s “Europa Europa” (1990) Krzysztof Kieslowski’s “White” (1994); she was also in Linklater’s Before Sunrise Waking Life and Before Sunset and dumped Bill Murray at the beginning of Jim Jarmusch’s Broken Flowers. She also took time off to study film at NYU and work on 30 student films.

What she’s done here is avoid any temptation to recycle the usual Paris lovers themes by creating two original, quirky characters so consumed by their differences that Paris becomes almost secondary. I don’t think there was even one accordion in this movie.

Watch Two dazed in Paris For Free On Gomovies.