Beyond the Multiplex

"2 Days in Paris": He's a cruel hypochondriac and she's a nutso nympho. But they'll always have Paris!
You won't get a sense, right away, of how borderline-crazy "2 Days in Paris" is going to get from its first few minutes. Which are frankly pretty irritating. Jack (Adam Goldberg) and his French girlfriend Marion (Julie Delpy) are just stopping off in Paris for a weekend on their way back to New York, after a holiday in Venice. Jack's a xenophobic Manhattanite straight out of mid-period Woody Allen, afraid of germs and foreigners, but even more contemptuous of American tourists. Marion is a hothead who demands immediate service and picks fights with strangers, and seems to encounter a moonstruck ex-boyfriend at every Parisian cafe.

Delpy narrates the opening scene in awkward voice-over, and at first the movie seems overcrowded with shtick: Jack thinks he's getting the flu, their cab driver is anti-Arab and anti-Semitic, and a load of overweight Midwesterners drift through on a "Da Vinci Code" tour. (Jack deliberately sends them in the wrong direction.) But stick with it. As "2 Days in Paris" zings along from one overamped frogs-vs.-Yanks cliché to the next, two things happen: Delpy's direction begins to give the characters more air and space, and you adjust to its hectic pace. Around the time that Marion's dotty, adorable mother -- played by Delpy's real mother, the actress Marie Pillet -- compliments Jack on his penis (she's seen pictures!) I finally grasped the idea: This movie is out of its mind.

We are nowhere near the moody, languid romance of "Before Sunrise" here. As Delpy observes in our highly entertaining conversation at a New York hotel bar, neither Jack nor Marion is all that likable a character. The fights she picks in public get nuttier and nuttier: In one scene, she counterattacks another racist cabbie by making a Nazi salute (and a Hitler mustache with her finger) and intoning loudly, "Welcome to France! Welcome to France!" When she spies yet another ex-boyfriend in a cafe, she flies into a violent rage and accuses him of being a pedophile who frequents 12-year-old prostitutes. "You're like Mike Tyson," Jack observes in wonderment. "I'm dating Mike Tyson."

Jack is a painfully ignorant and arrogant American, who doesn't speak a single word of French, but then the natives turn out to be just as weird and sex-crazed as advertised. Marion's father (again, that would be Julie's dad, Albert Delpy) is a painter, but only of pornographic topics. Someone at a party launches into a long monologue about the hostile nature of the female genitalia. (Or as Delpy puts it, amid giggles, "the shape of the shaved poussy.") When Marion's parents call the fire department -- bewilderingly, since they have a leak, not a fire -- Marion can't keep her eyes or hands off the handsome lunks in their skin-tight, Scottish wool uniforms. Then there are all those racy text messages on Marion's phone, which Jack slowly decodes with the help of his Larousse dictionary.

Delpy definitely never solves all the film's conundrums: I wasn't convinced that Jack and Marion should end up together, or that I cared whether they did. (Although I do love the fairy -- the anti-globalization activist fairy, of course -- who convinces Jack to pursue Marion at the crucial juncture.) But Delpy's writing is sharply observed and often hilarious, and her own performance as the perennially enraged Marion -- whom she says was inspired by Robert De Niro's Jake LaMotta in "Raging Bull" -- is one of her most memorable. Most of all, there's an active filmmaking intelligence at work in "2 Days in Paris," one that's going to learn from the experience and move onward. (Delpy has already started work on her next film as a director, "The Countess," a macabre historical thriller in which she will also star.)

Delpy can seem like an intimidating renaissance woman who writes, directs, edits, composes music and for all I know paints, knits and makes a mean gazpacho. But in conversation she turned out to be friendly, funny, completely amenable to criticism and eager to listen as well as talk. She reports that she recently quit drinking and smoking to keep her energy level up, although it's hard to imagine that was a problem. Her character in the film, Marion, has also quit smoking, and complains that she has a fat ass as a result. It did not seem remotely appropriate, let alone gentlemanly, to raise this issue with Delpy. Suffice it to say that she looks as lovely as ever.

You know, you sit through this movie and then you watch the credits, and it's pretty amazing. Your name just keeps coming up.

I know. That's why I didn't put all those credits at the beginning! That would have been really embarrassing.

Let's see. You wrote the film, you directed the film, you co-produced the film, you edited the film and you ...

Composed the music! I also designed the poster, but that isn't in the credits.

Wow. Did you, like, tape down the electrical wiring too? And put out the snacks on the deli table?

No, but I did stuff you don't want to know about, like running errands for production. Bringing in tape decks that broke down during editing, getting them fixed. My friends would say, "Isn't it stressful to be the writer and director, and to act in the film?" That part is not stressful. What's stressful is being the person who has to fix the computer that crashed. My boyfriend, who's in the business and has seen many films being made, couldn't believe what I was doing. He would say to me, "That's not your job!" Well, OK. But who else is going to do it?

Is that just your personality? You like to be in control? If something goes wrong, you're the person who's going to jump in and fix it.

Sometimes I am good at delegating. I'm not a DoP [director of photography]. I can explain what I want, but I don't know how to light it. I can be very precise about what I want, but there are things I can't do. I don't know how to record good sound, but I know good sound is very important. So I allow time for the sound man, because I don't want to loop the film [i.e., rerecord the dialogue after filming]. For a film like this, I think looped sound would be terrible. We have two or three lines that we had to loop, and every time I see the film I can hear them. I really hate that. But I did have to take on some technical things I don't love doing. I'd rather focus on the creative side.

Next page: "You have to let go of your ego as a director"