The delightful surprise of 2 Days in Paris – written, directed by and starring Julie Delpy – is that it’s a female-made romance that largely takes the male’s point of view. Delpy plays a French photographer who brings her American boyfriend Jack (Adam Goldberg) to meet her Parisian family. Though she has a voiceover narration, we’re still largely seeing things through Jack’s paranoid eyes: the disapproval of her father, the winking of her ex-boyfriends and the aggressiveness of new potential suitors. The trick Delpy pulls, however, is to expose the ridiculousness of male jealousy from the inside out. The more we become mired in Jack’s insecurity, the sillier it seems. 2 Days in Paris is very similar to Before Sunriseand Before Sunset, the European romances Delpy made with Ethan Hawke and Richard Linklater, but she adds enough of her own directorial touches to elevate it beyond a copycat.
