WhatzUp

2 Days In Paris
by Derek Neff

2 Days in Paris

There’s a scene near the beginning of 2 Days in Paris in which Jack (Adam Goldberg) is approached by a group of just-off-the-plane red state Americans. After establishing that he’s “one of them,” and not one of those pesky French persons they’ve heard so much about, the tourists ask Jack for directions to the Louvre. Jack, of course, takes great pleasure in giving them the wrong directions.

Near the end of the movie, the tourists, looking careworn and frazzled (a gang of thugs has spray-painted profanities all over their Bush T-shirts) catch sight of Jack, and Jack looks back at them with a mixture of sheepishness and fear. Forty-eight hours have passed since they last saw each other. Jack hasn’t had much of a good time, either, but it is the American group I found myself wondering about. And then it occurred to me that those ugly Americans were the ones I would rather have spent my time with, not Jack or his French girlfriend Marion.

Jack has been dating Marion for two years. They’re visiting Paris at the end of a long and not-very-fun vacation in Venice. Parisian-born Marion (played by Julie Delpy, who also wrote and directed) wants to see her family before heading back to the States; hypochondriacal Jack just wants to get back home to his germ-free apartment and his high-speed Internet. In the course of the next two days the two do a myriad of trivial things – visit Jim Morrison’s grave, go to the local food markets, hit a party or two, meet some of Marion’s ex-lovers and ride taxi after taxi – but mostly what they do is talk. And talk some more. They talk incessantly, though almost nothing gets said.

Jack is grumpy and sarcastic, Marion flighty and ill-tempered. They disagree over so many small and inconsequential things that you can’t even call it arguing; it’s just random bickering. It’s not clear whether or not it’s Jack and Marion who have absolutely no sexual chemistry, or Goldberg and Delpy, but it scarcely matters; when the two do attempt to have sex, they may as well be changing a fuse.

Both lead actors are alumni of equally talky Richard Linklater films (Goldberg was in Dazed and Confused, and Delpy, of course, was in the lovely-beyond-words Before Sunrise), but the two seem to have learned all the wrong lessons from Linklater. You can’t just train a camera on two people as they’re walking down the street talking and automatically expect magic.

Watching Delpy at work here, I was reminded of another talented actor in her late-30s who recently wrote and directed her own quirky comedy-drama. I’m referring of course to the late Adrienne Shelley, whose Waitress managed to be winsome, sad and wise all at the same time. By comparison, Delpy (who sports large glasses remarkably similar to Shelley’s in Waitress) has made a film that comes off seeming a bit aimless and misanthropic. A few semi-interesting things get said about commitment and the dating life, I suppose, but they could hardly be called revelatory. As for the plight of that group of clueless tourists as they meandered through a city not exactly known for its warm feelings toward Bush’s foreign policy, now that would have made for an interesting movie.