Confession: I love Julie Delpy. My wife knows. We are on a fantasy quid pro quo with Julie for me and Luvly Lee Mead (the sickenly handsome, sickenly talented, sickenly nice Joseph) for her. I only share this embarrassing revelation with you dear reader as a warning that my usual renowned rigorously critical objectivity may be compromised by a love that dare speak its name. My philosophical detachment blown away by unrequitable passion. My enamorata is both so sexy and such fun!

And there is a lot of Julie to love in this quirky, sharp, unsentimental, delightful tease on the way in our culture love, sex, and emotional intimacy is deeply bound up with nationality, ownership, possession, and the jealousy that flows from them. The delectable Ms D (I’ll stop in a minute, don’t want my obsession to put you off a great little movie). The lady wrote, directed, stars in it and just to keep it in the family, has her Mum, Dad and even her curiously goggle-eyed almost thespian bloody cat in it. I wouldn’t be surprised to hear that she even made the tea and drove the trucks. She certainly did the music.

My amatory interest was aroused by the innocently direct Celine in one of the most romantic films ever made, Before Sunrise; then my passion was whetted with the matured Celine in Richard Linklater’s sequelBefore Sunset which Julie and co-star Ethan Hawke helped to write. 2 Days in Paris is all Miss Delpy. And I am lost. I loved it. And in case you are now pissed off with my masculine patheticness (patheticnicity?), so did my wife and my daughter (both taking a few hours off from Luvly Lee – we should start a support group – the Lee Mead Widowers Society ). New York based, quirkily independent Marion and lugubriously handsome Jack (Adam Goldberg) have been together for two years. Time for the first lovingly burnished shine of new love to have been slightly dulled by Adam’s disposition to hypochondria-light (allergies, migraines, and vague ‘not-wellnessness’ that conveniently coincides with situations he doesn’t want to deal with). Christ he only needed dyslexia to have a full set. They arrive in the film from two weeks in Italy, mostly Venice, which appears to have been more a challenge to Adam’s immune system than his romantic passion. Diarrhoea lacks romantic resonance I guess. With the blindness of love, Marion finds this in my view, terminal wimpishness, merely endearing and they move on to spend two days with her parents in Paris so that Jack can meet them and the cat.

Delicious culture shock looms. The now US–resident Miss D has a very articulate and witty foot placed in both national cultures and the essence of the humour and stylish fun of 2 Days is her perceptive, teasing mockery of the absurdities of both. From Jack’s casual misdirection of a bunch of fellow Americans to an endless, fruitless search in the wrong direction for the Louvre justified by their ‘support Bush’ Tee-shirts; to Marion’s laid-back attitude to her, shall we say adventurous love-life before she met Jack. The clash of attitudes is perfectly expressed by a matter-of-fact admission from Marion that she gave an old flame, now florist Manu, a blow-job with the insouciance of someone talking about giving directions to the Gare du Nord. Jack somewhat acidly observes that this definitive act of feminine generosity, blew, so-to-speak, the hopes of a genuine US liberal democracy out of the water.

Things just get worse for fish-out-of-water-in-France Jack as half the male population of Paris appear to have been on how-shall-we-say, more than distant hand-shake terms with the increasingly sexually amnesiac Marion. A chance meeting with a more recent old flame in a restaurant has Marion incandescent with rage leading to her and the linguistically-challenged, totally bemused Jack being physically removed from the premises. Here male Anglos-Saxon reason and logic shipwrecks helplesslessly on the unfathomable rock of a beautiful woman’s heart. 2 Days In Paris is romance for modern savvy adults. Stylish, witty, perceptive and persistently laugh-out-loud funny, it engages you from the start and never outstays its welcome. Miss D avoids all the dangers of sentimentality and in Marion creates a very real woman that many of us poor sap men will have encountered. Elusive, unreadable, inconsistent, delightful, sexy as hell, perplexing, fucking impossible, and absolutely irresistible. The perfect illustration that love is the knowing, self-infliction of exquisite, irrational, totally incomprehensible pain. The absurdity of life and love is what makes it all so precious.

07809 207645. Call me Julie. Call me.

Zettel

Yes, this was quite an entertaining film compared with some I've seen of late - 'Knocked Up' springs to mind. Delpy owes a lot to Woody Allen, I think.

Wasn't it only last week you were slavering over that girl in the Harry Potter films?

Why did the man have to be so deeply unatractive, even when he didn't have his eyes crossed? Also, I don't know what was wrong with the guy's I.Q.. There he was with an extremely attractive woman, whom he'd met when she was what- 33? - and he was surprised she's got to first base with some of those sophisticated, intelligent Frenchmen? I suspect oral sex is something nice American girls don't do, such is their apparent obsession with finding one who will 'go down' on them. Maybe that's why Clinton had to risk his all.

No, an even funnier film could have been made of a half-way intelligent French woman coming to terms with America and some ex-girlfriends of her American lover. Or is there one I don't know about?

Sheila

Slavering!

I'm shocked Sheila that you should treat this deep spiritual connection of mine with the blessed Julie with such dismissive disdain. Indeed if I may say so, sexist contempt. Even dumbstick do do's sometimes like a little hilarity with their carnality now and then. Anyway it would have been a bit offside to slaver over that mere slip of girl Hermione, full of feisty promise though she may be. It was boring old Harry's sex-life I was concerned to liven up in that case. A bit of judicious wand-wandering would do him no harm at all. His only kiss in the Phoenix had all the passion of a visit to the tuckshop for a Crunchie.

I agree poor old Jack wasn't the sharpest pick in the ice bucket but Adam Goldberg has a fine sense of comic timing bred of lots of TV work including Friends and I guess the whole film played somewhat with stereotypes. Miss D has been in America long enough to know that for a comedy to make money in there a bit of broad obviousness is essential or the poor dears just won't keep up. 2 days has a lightness of touch and sense of fun missing from the typically US leaden sexual humour in Knocked Up. Although she played it down a fair bit, Delpy still demonstrated exactly what her film was about, that the Americans simply can't make good movies about sex becasue they take the whole thing far far too seriously. And as all Frenchman, most Europeans and the occasional errant Englishman know, sex is far too important to take seriously.

Your movie reersing the setting and circumstances wouldn't work. No intelligent French or even Eurpoean woman would ever allow her American lover to KNOW that she had any interest whatsoever in his past partners. She'd probably find out but not through him.

Regards - slaveringly

Z

Yes, you are right - as usual. I hadn't seen Goldberg in 'Friends' because I haven't watched 'Friends' enough.

I see Woody Allen's latest film has only two stars in the Evening Standard, but not thought so bad as 'Scoop' which I saw in France and no wonder it went straight to video -it was embarrassing.

As for Americans and sex the most horrible film I saw recently - in fact, it was at the London Film Festival, so not so recent, but it was released in the summer - was a film in which a girl gave a blow-job to her dog! I think it was called 'Sleeping Dogs', because the moral was you should't ever confess these things. Now that's something the " 2 Days in Paris' guy really would have got my sympathy for.

Sheila

Well:

Meet the Fockers was a very popular film within which the running 'gag' was the dog humping a cuddly toy. This was about as funny as herpes the first time they showed it and then just kept repeating it. Instead of nudity clause I reckon the stars should have a crap clause. yet actors who CAN'T need the money keep turing up in the most unuttterable tripe. Ho hum.

Anyway make sure you don't miss Private Fears in Public Places (Coeurs in France). Superb.

regards

Z

Zettel, yes, I saw the Fokkers by istake in Barcelona because it had a completely misleading title and was my partner miffed - I lost in a swoop all my credibility as far as understanding Spanish was concerned. I don't know why they had this thing of giving Spanish titles to films, even thought the soundtrack was English. Mostly in Spain it's impossible to go to the cinema because all the films are dubbed into Spanish.I watch DVDs on my laptop when I'm there.

At least we might have left right away if the Fokkers had been dubbed. It went straight downhill from that dreadful first birth scene with the joke about the name. I felt sorry for Robert De Niro trapped in such an awful movie. What I hated most was the toilet joke about the ater shortage, and Dustin Hoffman saying 'If it's yellow,let it mellow, if it's brown, flush it down'.

Yes, these stars need discerning managers - like Dirk Bogarde, for instance whose autobiography I've been listening to on disk - about the fifth episode, I think, called 'A Short Walk from Harrods ' Again I was misled by the title, because it's mainly set in the South of France. Dirk hardly ever had to do any rubbish, excpet towards the end when he knew exactly why he was doing it and he was in his late sixties anyway.

I remember one review of '2 Days' said it was a 'meet the parents' movie, but I was thinking more 'Guess who's Coming to Dinner?' than the Fokkers.Were there some more that I've missed?

I will look out for 'Private Fears'.

Sheila

Sheila

'2 Days' is a "meet the parents movie" in the sense that idiot Paxman called Bergman the most boring depressing filmaker ever.

regards

Z

OK. By the way, I just read an entertaining article in the Guardian by Joe Queenan about Apatow's popular comedies, including 'Knocked Up'. I looked it up on Guardian Unlimited, without success, but did read that Julie Delpy is coming to live in Brixton!!! LOL. She said she was there in the eighties. There were riots there then, as I recall. In fact, I do recall driving past the burnt-out stores in the High Street on my way to work. Maybe she means Brixham, which I think is in Devon.

It was in this interview:

http://film.guardian.co.uk/features/featurepages/0,,2160669,00.html

Sheila

Sheila

Memo from my wife:

"Gee thanks. He doesn't need anymore encouragment......"

regards

Z

Oh, I thought 'fantasy quid pro quo' meant you had an 'open' marriage - open ogling, that is.

My husband admires a film-star named Julie, too, but he keeps quiet about it. I realised it when he came out of 'Singalong-a-Sound-of-Music' looking deeply upset. He obviously hadn't realised it was going to be satirical, although the nun's head-dress I was wearing might have clued him.

Anyway, I'm sure you are much too sensible to loiter in Brixton market on the off-chance - or in Brixham, for that matter.


Sheila

Don't bet on it.

Christie? Now that's a very moving film too.

Z

write out 100 times

sickeningly, sickeningly, sickeningly......

If I'd realised it was such a mouthful I wouldn't have used it....3 times!

Z

OK you got me

inamorata as well.

Z