2 Days in New York

Overview

Julie Delpy has a particular writing style. You might call it The Hangover for the high brow. It's full of cursing and smoking weed and laughing at words that sound like 'cunnilingus', and getting caught in webs of awkwardness after you tell your uptight neighbour to stop riding you because you're dying of cancer when you're not. And yet her audience is more Dendy than Hoyts. Teen boys don't aspire to live out Delpy scenes at schoolies.

2 Days in New York finds her character, Marion, broken up with her 2 Days in Paris boyfriend, Jack, not long after the birth of their son. Because that's the kind of thing that happens under Delpy's watch: not all relationships are forever. And figuring out this commitment thing is part of the story here. Her relationship with her new de facto, Mingus (Chris Rock), is about to be tested as Marion's family comes for a visit from Paris.

The couple, who met while working at the Village Voice, have their typically NY neuroses stretched beyond cute. Marion's rotund father, Jeannot (Albert Delpy, Julie Delpy's real life dad), has tried to smuggle in several sausages upon his person; her sister, Rose (Alexia Landeau), has no affinity with American puritanism; and her sister's boyfriend, Manu (Alexandre Nahon), thinks Mingus will be cool with him doing a drug deal in the flat because he's black. Delpy's mother, Marie Pillet, who was a delight as Marion's mother Anna in 2 Days in Paris, has since died, and in 2 days in New York, as in life, her daughter is still trying to accept her death.

Some people find the Delpy aesthetic grating and as thin as the gross-out comedies alluded to earlier. And while it may be true that this film is 'about nothing' and sometimes blithely scrappy, it's also blinkered to think that Delpy's quirks don't matter. Quirks isn't even the right word, attached as it currently is to a whimsy and cutesiness that bear no relation to the 2 Days In universe. She somehow gets to make un-Hollywood films that reach a large-ish audience, and that's an incredibly refreshing thing to see.

Because apart from bawdy and untraditional, funny and generous, the other thing Two Days in Paris is, is internationalist. In Delpy's world, main characters don't all come from the same country, speak the same language, or share the same culture. Their differences may be the engine of humour, but everyone is shown respect and understanding that goes beyond stereotype. The set-up is a reality many people live but somehow rarely see on screen.

There's one very telling early scene: Mingus takes Marion's father, who speaks no English unless it's to say something inappropriate, to his regular Thai massage centre to help him loosen up after the trans-Atlantic flight. We all sink down in our seats, but the worst does not happen. Far from it. Mingus emerges after his massage to see Jeannot sharing a cup of tea with the owners, with whom he has been conversing in scraps of Vietnamese. It turns out the owners are actually from Saigon, a city in which Jeannot also spent his childhood. The man might not understand Americans, but his experience has given him a worldliness that is beautifully acknowledged.