2 Days in Paris speaks of some good gifts that writer/director/composer/editor/co-star Julie Delpy can provide when on a project such as this. It's a personal film, with former boyfriend Adam Goldberg cast as Delpy's character's current significant other of two years, and how the two of them go through Europe trying to reignite the passion of their relationship but fall flat. Now, it might sound like it'll be one of *those* movies, where each partner ends up going off to others for sex, lots of lurid depictions, etc. But it's a lot more fluffy at times, and a lot more scathing, in its sensibilities on relationships than that. In the tone of improvisation with the dialog (how much or little would depend on the scene, I'd figure, as the voice-overs are definitely right from the script) seems to come from a Linklater-based formula, but this is probably where the comparisons should end (with the exception being perhaps the idea of chance encounters, here used with grimace). It's about the disintegration of a relationship, as it ends up unfolding, but unfortunately it doesn't seem to amount to much in the long-run.
Not that Delpy doesn't have a lot of ideas to express on how each side of the relationship has insecurities and doubts and guises and real love to share. Goldberg, playing a kind of Woody Allen type of neurotic figure, and Delpy also in a form of quasi-neuroses, start off with a sort of sensibility between the two of them that's understood- he'll make subtle wisecracks, constantly, and she'll respond usually in kind. But then come the ex-boyfriends- as a form of unintended proof about Goldberg's theory, formed in Paris, that people across one side of the world will likely meet people one knows on the other side- and it starts to set off a chain reaction of questions raised and poised, trust broken, and the climax coming as exposition and a really stupid denouement with a dance in the street. It wont be anything of a Bergman scale of revelation, at the end of it all, but at the least 2 Days in Paris does afford many genuine moments of laughs and some nifty style amid the pretension. I liked Delpy's parents- played by her real life parents- who were nutty without being too over-the-top as caricatures, weird enough to unnerve Goldberg (rabbit for dinner?), while being sort of friendly and open (sex with Jim Morrison, who knew?).
I liked the moments of comic tension in the cab rides. And whenever a seethingly uncomfortable moment sprang up in a party scene (there's one line, I can't recall it now, but it comes during one of those drunken dialog bits that don't sound written at all, and it's the funniest in the film), it's a sweet piece of dark romantic comedy. The only shame then is that there's not a whole lot that Delpy adds to anything that hasn't been said in other romantic comedies, better ones, even with more realistic characters than most. Fine to see once with a couple of glasses of wine and with/without cigarettes, but as a tale of two people caught in a foreign land with the weight of circumstance and past ghosts in a relationship coming back up at the both of them I'd stick with Rossellini's 1953 film.
Not that Delpy doesn't have a lot of ideas to express on how each side of the relationship has insecurities and doubts and guises and real love to share. Goldberg, playing a kind of Woody Allen type of neurotic figure, and Delpy also in a form of quasi-neuroses, start off with a sort of sensibility between the two of them that's understood- he'll make subtle wisecracks, constantly, and she'll respond usually in kind. But then come the ex-boyfriends- as a form of unintended proof about Goldberg's theory, formed in Paris, that people across one side of the world will likely meet people one knows on the other side- and it starts to set off a chain reaction of questions raised and poised, trust broken, and the climax coming as exposition and a really stupid denouement with a dance in the street. It wont be anything of a Bergman scale of revelation, at the end of it all, but at the least 2 Days in Paris does afford many genuine moments of laughs and some nifty style amid the pretension. I liked Delpy's parents- played by her real life parents- who were nutty without being too over-the-top as caricatures, weird enough to unnerve Goldberg (rabbit for dinner?), while being sort of friendly and open (sex with Jim Morrison, who knew?).
I liked the moments of comic tension in the cab rides. And whenever a seethingly uncomfortable moment sprang up in a party scene (there's one line, I can't recall it now, but it comes during one of those drunken dialog bits that don't sound written at all, and it's the funniest in the film), it's a sweet piece of dark romantic comedy. The only shame then is that there's not a whole lot that Delpy adds to anything that hasn't been said in other romantic comedies, better ones, even with more realistic characters than most. Fine to see once with a couple of glasses of wine and with/without cigarettes, but as a tale of two people caught in a foreign land with the weight of circumstance and past ghosts in a relationship coming back up at the both of them I'd stick with Rossellini's 1953 film.