An Intelligent, Hilarious Comedy About a Couple's Relationship Crisis
If you enjoyed Annie Hall (1977) and Before Sunset (2004), you'll probably want to see 2 Days in Paris (2007), a laugh-out-loud-funny film written and directed by Julie Delpy, who also costars with Adam Goldberg. In the movie, Marion (Delpy) and Jack (Goldberg) are a pair of 35-year-olds who have been a couple for two years when they stop over briefly in an anti-romantic Paris. Their relationship has reached that delicate stage where they have to decide whether or not to stay together, and events that unfold during their sojourn in the French capital tend to drive them apart.
Marion, a photographer, once posed Jack au naturel and took a whimsical, comical snapshot of him — the picture is shown in the movie, and I won't spoil your fun by describing it — but later Jack is annoyed to find she has a photo of another nude man in exactly the same pose. During the course of Marion's and Jack's visit, they encounter a series of her former lovers, and some details about her past emerge that he would have preferred to remain hazy. All this leads to bickering between them, and an anguished Jack wails, "We're not in Paris — we're in hell!"
That's when Jack goes off alone to a burger joint, where he runs into a strange anti-globalization activist. Meanwhile, Marion joins an ex-boyfriend in his apartment, where he keeps a mannequin that looks like her.
Julie Delpy's Paris
Julie Delpy grew up in Paris, but since early adulthood, she has spent most of her time in the United States. In 2 Days in Paris, she shows us different aspects of her home city from those we usually see in movies.
There's a fascinating scene where Marion and Jack are riding in a Paris taxi when the xenophobic and racist driver launches into a rant against Arabs, Germans and Romanians. And in another sequence, a water pipe bursts in Marion's parents' Paris apartment, and unable to come up with a sensible approach to the problem, they bring in the fire department.
Although Delpy avoids clichés, she does take Marion and Jack to a couple of tourist spots. They go to Père Lachaise and visit the gravesite of The Doors' Jim Morrison. And they walk out onto the Pont de Bir-Hakeim, where Marlon Brando has an encounter with Maria Schneider in Last Tango in Paris (1972).
Even when not romanticized, the City of Lights still has its charms. The second of the two days Marion and Jack spend there happens to be one when the streets are filled with music. The Fête de la Musique began in France in the 1980s, and the idea has since spread to other countries. Under the more general name World Music Day, it is now an annual celebration in many cities on June 21.
Interview With Julie Delpy and Extended Scenes
The most interesting bonus material on the 2 Days in Paris DVD is the 16-minute "An Interview With Julie Delpy." Here she talks about writing, directing, acting in, editing and composing the score for the movie, but she doesn't mention that she also sings a couple of the songs on the soundtrack. Delpy says her real-life parents, who are actors, play her character's parents in the film. She gives no hint that at one time she and Adam Goldberg were a real-life couple, but she does remark that she got some advice on prerecorded music to use on the soundtrack from her boyfriend, apparently referring to movie composer Marc Streitenfeld (American Gangster).
Delpy sheds light on some subtle allusions in her film. She has Marion and Jack just coming off a miserable trip to Venice as a reference to Rossellini's Voyage in Italy (1954), where Ingrid Bergman and George Sanders play a couple whose marriage is in crisis. Delpy says she has Jack watch M (1931) on his laptop to suggest his outsider status has some parallels to that of Peter Lorre's character in Fritz Lang's classic. Finally, she says she named Marion's cat Jean-Luc after celebrated French filmmaker Godard.
The only other extra on the DVD consists of the "Extended Scenes." There are five of these, and they have a total runtime of about 13 minutes. These are mostly longer versions of scenes of characters talking, and Delpy was wise to trim them: even with the cuts, the film is arguably a little dialogue-heavy.
DVD Details
Below I have listed the details for the DVD containing 2 Days in Paris.
Release Date: February 5, 2008
Feature Film Runtime: 1 hour 41 minutes
MPAA Rating: R for Sexual Content, Some Nudity and Language
Widescreen (1.85:1), Color
English/French 5.1 Dolby Surround
English Subtitles
Spanish Subtitles
An Interview With Julie Delpy (16 min.)
Extended Scenes (5 scenes with total runtime = 13 min.)
