Two Days in Paris
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Movie Reviews of Two Days in Paris
Movie Review: brilliant
Summary: 5 Stars
A comedic play in two languages. French and English, European and American attitudes, pop history and modernism, neuroses and silliness combine marvelously in this hilarious "small" movie. A jewel in the rough streets of Paris.Movie Review: AWESOME!!!!!
Summary: 5 Stars
This movie is just awesome, it doesn't even seem like I'm watching actors...I feel like I'm watching their life b/c it's so commical and so real. It's hilarious and I recommend it.Movie Review: Delightful and hilarious
Summary: 5 Stars
This movie is witty and subtle. The humor is a little crass, but in a good way. Julie Delpy is a very talented actor and director.Movie Review: Delpy Dexterously Reveals the Minutiae of a Fractious Couple in the City of Lights
Summary: 4 Stars
Julie Delpy has a most acerbically idiosyncratic ear for dialogue, and she seems to have this facility in both English and French. The disarming actress actually co-wrote the perceptive script to Richard Linklater's Before Sunset (2005), the reflective nine-years later sequel to Before Sunrise, with Linklater and co-star Ethan Hawke. This time, she takes charge of the script and direction, as well as the leading role of a French photographer named Marion, who stops at her part-time flat in Paris with her angst-driven American boyfriend Jack. On their way back to New York from a disastrous trip to Venice, the fractious couple stops over to visit her eccentric parents, but it turns into a more revelatory trip about her past than either is prepared to face.
While the similarities to the Linklater films are self-evident, the 2007 film reminds me most of Woody Allen's epochal Annie Hall but obviously over a much more concentrated period and with a far more bracing tone. The ramshackle, seemingly unstructured scenes pick up a detail of life that for better and worse, one rarely gets to see on screen. Taken as a series of off-kilter episodes, the movie is entertaining, especially a rabbit dinner scene that firmly establishes Jack as the family outsider. Viewed as a whole, however, it falls short in making a more resonant observation about the characters other than their mounting incompatibility. Part of the reason is that we can already tell from the first scene when the couple is waiting for a taxicab that they thrive on conflict, so what tethers them has a degree of questionability from the outset.
Another reason is a discernible imbalance between the leads. With the Linklater films as her obvious training ground, Delpy brings such an intelligent spark to Marion that every moment feels spontaneous. Her assured and particularly Gallic sense of self grounds the film when it threatens to get overwhelmed by its eccentricities. Casting the often nerve-grating Adam Goldberg as Jack is a bold move for Delpy and not an altogether successful one. With his intense stare and constantly put-upon manner, the actor comes across as more irritating than clever even though Delpy generously gives him the lion's share of the laughs. It is she who makes them believable as a couple. What he does do well is portray his faltering confidence and increasing paranoia in primal strokes.
Over those two defining days, Jack meets Marion's artsy, offbeat friends, three of whom are ex-lovers, and the unwanted attention of a number of other men. The funniest, most unexpected scene is in the Metro when they try avoiding a death-stare stranger who has no hesitation circling them like a buzzard. A genuine spark is provided by Delpy's real-life parents, Albert Delpy and Marie Pillet, who play Marion's bohemian, exasperating parents. With Delpy showing obvious talent behind and in front of the camera, the film is caustic fun and an effective, sometimes wistful rumination on what couples really know about each other. I just wish it came together a bit more than it does.
Movie Review: Paris can be "Hell" for Lovers.
Summary: 4 Stars
Hollywood would have us believe that Paris is for lovers. In Sabrina, Humphrey Bogart's character says that he has never been to Paris because Paris is for lovers. In Casablanca, his character Rick reminds Ingrid Bergman, "We'll always have Paris." However, in her smart wonder of a film, 2 Days in Paris (2007), Julie Delpy suggests Paris isn't always for lovers--that Paris can be "Hell" for the wrong couple. (As the saying goes, it doesn't matter where you are, but who you're with.) Delpy's 2 Days in Paris is ultimately a reality lesson in incompatibility.
Best known for her roles in Europa Europa, Three Colors Trilogy (White), and Before Sunrise/Before Sunset, Delpy wrote, directed, edited, co-produced, and composed the soundtrack for 2 Days in Paris. The film stars Delpy and her former real-life love interest Adam Goldberg, as well as Delpy's parents, Marie Pillet and Albert Delpy. Delpy plays a quirky Annie Hall type character, Marion. She is a French photographer who pays a two-day visit to Paris with her neurotic, New York, Woody-Allen type boyfriend, Jack (Goldberg). From the film's opening scenes, despite their shared sense of humour about such things as DaVinci Coders and Bush supporters representing all that is culturally and politically wrong with the U.S., it is obvious Marion and Jack are having relationship issues. The film is about what happens to Marion and Jack when their already-strained relationship is further subjected to Marion's parents and to Marion's numerous old lovers. For Jack, the City of Lights illuminates qualities in Marion that he has never noticed before. He wonders, is she a bohemian like her parents? Is she a whore? Clearly, this is a couple that does not belong together. While 2 Days in Paris is neither Before Sunrise nor Before Sunset (both of which I highly recommend), it is nevertheless an equally intelligent film (rich in dialogue and subtle scenes), which raises many interesting questions about relationships one rarely finds in Hollywood romantic comedies. One wonders, what has kept Jack and Marion together for the two years since their first date? By the end of the film it is reassuring that, unlike Bogart and Bergman's characters in Casablanca, Marion and Jack won't always have Paris. For them, two days in Paris was enough.
G. Merritt