"2 Days in Paris," on the other hand, is an altogether different beast. It's the story of Jack (Adam Goldberg) and Marion (Julie Delpy), a pair of star-crossed lovers who have decided to end their romantic European vacation by spending two days in Marion's native Paris. Sounds really sweet, right? Except for the fact that the romantic European vacation was spoiled by Jack's chronic diarrhea. When he wasn't locked in the bathroom, Jack was prowling the streets of Venice obsessively photo-documenting everything in sight. As Marion notes, "Instead of kissing on the gondola, Jack took 48 pictures on the gondola."
All this before the movie even begins. Once Marion and Jack arrive in Paris, things only get worse. They movie into the apartment of Marion's parents, a cheerfully insane couple whose eccentricities would put Bernie and Roz Focker to shame. Marion's dad is a jolly Gallic ogre who gobbles up rabbit heads and trundles around the streets of Paris keying cars for fun; the mom is an aging hippie with a Frederick Douglass hairdo, who may or may not have had an affair with Jim Morrison back in the '60s.
It gets weirder. During their stay in Paris, Jack and Marion encounter neo-Nazi cab drivers, pyromaniacal pixies, a battalion of "Da Vinci Code" cultists and more. None of this seems to faze Jack, who is too busy obsessing over Marion's endless array of ex-boyfriends. They emerge out of the woodwork at parties, in restaurants, on street corners -- one is a recently published novelist, another a conceptual artist who wraps duct-tape around naked female mannequins. The discovery of Marion's vast sexual history quickly begins to chip away at Jack's already fragile ego, and before long their relationship takes a turn for the worse.
You know guys like Jack. This is the kind of guy who gets an eye infection and assumes it's ocular chlamydia. He won't ride the subway for fear of terrorism, and he hates small children because they carry disease. In short, he's a younger version of Woody Allen at his most unabashedly acerbic. What a nice girl like Marion sees in him is anybody's guess, but then again, she's got problems of her own. Frequently pitched at the edge of violent hysteria, Marion's tranquil exterior occasionally explodes into incandescent rage (Delpy claims to have based the performance off Robert De Niro in "Raging Bull"). A chance encounter in a quiet cafe has Marion practically foaming at the mouth, while Jack frets and stutters on the sidelines.
The fact that "2 Days in Paris" works as an inspired black comedy -- rather than collapsing, as it so easily could, into a venomous mess -- is a tribute to the directorial skills of Julie Delpy, who pulls the material together into a scathing post-feminist critique. Alas, Delpy seems to have been so occupied by writing, directing, producing, scoring and editing "2 Days in Paris" (not to mention casting her own mother and father as Marion's parents) that she neglected to direct her own performance. Her sarcastic banter hovers between sincerity and self-parody, and the resulting ambiguity dulls some of Marion's barbs.
Adam Goldberg, on the other hand, is in fine form; he endows Jack with a strutting, nervous pomposity that I found tremendously watchable. Goldberg practically glowers the whole performance from beneath his bushy black eyebrows, but every time he speaks -- in a yappy, rodent-like whine that I soon grew to love -- the illusion of machismo falls hilariously apart. Goldberg also recognizes a latent streak of misogyny beneath Jack's neurosis, and suddenly the point of "2 Days in Paris" becomes clear: It's a searing portrait of a male ego grappling with female sexual independence. As Jack reminds Marion after meeting one of her exes, "You may be a lamb chop, but you're my lamb chop."
How can characters this caustic be so lovable? I'm not really sure. But by the time "2 Days in Paris" trembled to its bittersweet conclusion, I found myself hopelessly in love with Jack and Marion, flaws and all. Perhaps the secret to the film is that, underneath their prickly exteriors, Jack and Marion really do love each other in a crazy sort of way. That's the great thing about "2 Days in Paris" -- it's an utterly mean-spirited film that leaves you feeling warm and fuzzy.
