Walking and talking

>> Julie Delpy’s 2 Days in Paris is a familiar
but charming character piece

by MARK SLUTSKY

I guess the kind of movie where Julie Delpy walks around a European city with an American paramour, discussing life, love and sex, is pretty much a genre unto itself now. In Richard Linklater’s 1995 Before Sunrise, she and Ethan Hawke wandered the streets of Vienna for a memorable night, and the two re-united (and contributed to the screenplay) for 2004’s excellent sequel, Before Sunset. Now Delpy stars in—as well as directs, scripts, scores and even edits—2 Days in Paris, a movie that definitely fits into the same genre as Linklater’s films, while at the same time being very much its own thing.

Delpy and Adam Goldberg play a couple returning to New York after a Venice vacation. Goldberg is a fretful neurotic Jewish (well, sort of) New Yorker and Delpy is a Paris-bred photographer. On their way back to the States, the two stop in Paris for a couple of days to see her family and tour around the city a bit.

Goldberg is predictably overwhelmed by Delpy’s loving, candidly honest family and her seemingly endless parade of ex-boyfriends, and as the days progress, the two get at each other’s throats a few times (although the drama is smartly underplayed and always infused with a playful sense of humour).

That’s about it—like the Before movies, 2 Days in Paris is less about incident and more about character. Unlike Linklater’s films, which had a certain stylistic purity—just two people walking and talking, the second one even in real time—Delpy pulls out a bag of cinematic tricks, which give the movie its own particular character. We’re talking voice-over, flashbacks, even the characters’ photographs superimposed over the frames. It’s a little on the whimsical side, but the movie’s style has an undeniable, handmade appeal. It’s also more of a comedy than those other two films, which shied away from overt laugh lines or sight gags, but the humour works well.

Delpy and Goldberg seem well-matched as a couple and the actors are clearly comfortable enough with each other to make their chemistry seem unforced. Delpy also draws on a pool of Parisian family and friends, including her own dad, actor Albert Delpy, as her character’s father, which adds to the movie’s unforced, intimate charm.

2 Days in Paris opens this
Friday, Aug. 17

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