The 10th edition of Cinema au clair de lune (4-22 August, 2010), the open air cine festival organized by Forum des Images in Paris, reserves a good surprise: 2 days in Paris in on the program for the 14th of August, to be seen in the Parc de Choisy (13th arrondissement).

To arouse your appetite, here's the trailer:



A lot has been said about this successful independent film, but one my favourite critics includes the LA Times Carina Chocano one:

"2 Days in Paris" is pure Julie Delpy, figuratively and otherwise. Since first becoming known to American audiences in the early '90s, she's revealed herself to be an artist of sundry and unexpected talents, with a distinctive voice and point of view.

Most of these are on display in her first feature-length movie, which she wrote, directed, produced, edited, scored and stars in, opposite Adam Goldberg. She cast her real-life parents, Marie Pillet and Albert Delpy, as her parents in the movie. Finally, for what one can only assume is good measure, she sings the song that plays over the end credits, accompanied by the slinky French pop band Nouvelle Vague. If one were to learn that Delpy manned the craft services table between takes, it would come as no great surprise.

(...)

At first blush, "2 Days in Paris" looks like it's going to be the story of a culture-clashing couple. But slowly and rather slyly, Delpy zeros in on something much more subtle and complex. What interests her are not the superficial differences between people from different countries -- your skinned rabbit is my tourist in a Bush/Cheney T-shirt, and so forth -- but the way in which the distances between people, genders and cultures (the very distances we rely on to grant us the perspective needed to see how completely insane other people, genders, cultures really are) seem to shift constantly according to circumstances.

One moment, Jack is categorically rejecting all modes of European public transport (in case of terrorist attack), and the next he is recoiling from his compatriots because they have bad taste in books. Likewise, Marion chafes at Jack's American provincialism one moment, and can't believe how xenophobic Parisian taxi drivers are the next. No sooner has either one of them settled on a single, hidebound world-view than a situation arises to smack them out of it.

The more Jack -- who doesn't speak a word of French -- interacts with Marion's family, the more entrenched he becomes in abstract absolutes. "I'm an American," he tells one of Marion's exes. "What's mine is mine!" And yet, not long before this he found himself fending off Marion's father Jeannot's insinuation that all Americans are ignorant of French and even American literature. Jack may be covered in tattoos, but when Marion's former hippie mother (her first words of dialogue are "Can't those poor exploited nurses go on strike? This isn't America!") lets him in on a little secret about her sexual past, he's instantly transformed into a prig and a prude.

Naturally, the worm eventually turns, and Marion is left furious and sputtering after a chance encounter with an ex-lover who used his "immersion in Thai culture" (he worked for a foreign aid organization) as an excuse to do some very bad things. Is the German eco-activist (Daniel Brühl, seeming like he just walked off the set of anti-globalist caper "The Edukators") that Jack meets at a fast-food chain an Earth-saving "fairy," as he claims, or is he a terrorist? Delpy's wry, acerbic sense of humor and privileged perspective make her the ultimate outsider-insider, perfectly positioned to ask the most astute questions.

Eventually, a kind of synthesis arises from the battle of the perspectives -- that is, that there are no absolute ideas and no fixed identities. One man's freedom, as we know, is another man's French.

(...) Marion and Jack wander about Paris, talking in that way that lovers have when they're beginning to get on each other's nerves. But, no, this is not a retread of Richard Linklater's "Before Sunset" (2004), in which Delpy and Ethan Hawke walked and talked around Paris. It is a contemplation of incompatibility, as Paris brings out a side of Marion that Jack has never quite seen: Is she a radical political activist and a shameless slut, or does she only act like one? She runs into old boyfriends so often it makes Paris seem like a small town, and attacks one of them, in a restaurant, for taking a sex vacation to Thailand.

At home, her father quizzes Jack on French culture, and her mother is so eager to wash and press his clothes that he barely has time to get out of them. Both of Delpy's parents are professional actors, and so these are only performances, I hope. In addition to casting her parents, Delpy puts her mark on this film in many other ways: She starred, directed, wrote, edited, co-produced, composed the score and sang a song. When a women takes that many jobs, we slap her down for vanity. When a man does, we call him the new Orson Welles.

Delpy in fact has made a smart film with an edge to it; her Jack and Marion reveal things about themselves they never thought they'd tell anybody, and we wonder why they ever went out on a second date. Much has been made of the similarities between Delpy here and Diane Keaton in "Annie Hall" but if Delpy's character found a spider as big as a Buick in the bathroom, she'd braise it and serve it up for lunch.

Which is an oblique way of saying that Julie Delpy is an original, a woman who refuses to be defined or limited. Her first great roles were in Bertrand Tavernier's "Beatrice" (1987), Agnieszka Holland's "Europa Europa" (1990) and Krzysztof Kieslowski's "White" (1994); she was in Linklater's "Before Sunrise" "Waking Life" and "Before Sunset" and she dumped Bill Murray at the beginning of Jim Jarmusch's "Broken Flowers." In between, she studied film at NYU and made herself available for 30 student productions.

What she has done here is avoid all temptation to recycle the usual lovers-in-Paris possibilities, and has created two original, quirky characters so obsessed with their differences that Paris is almost a distraction. I don't think I heard a single accordion in the whole film.