I’ve just returned from a screening of 2 Days in Paris, a comedy written, directed, starring and edited by Julie Delpy of Before Sunrise/Before Sunset fame. Delpy has been very vocal about how her involvement in those Richard Linklater films helped her get funding for Paris. But I wonder if Delpy’s candor isn’t doing her new film a disservice. Earlier today, I read a review of Paris in L Magazine (via GreenCine Daily) which seems to exemplify the general critical reaction to the picture. “The movie suffers terribly of course from the inevitable comparisons to Before Sunrise/Sunset,” writes Benjamin Strong “But in all fairness to Delpy, show me a film that wouldn’t.” With that in mind, I came home from the Paris screening and watched several clips of Sunset on YouTube (cough cough the whole movie’s there in eight parts cough cough), and I think the comparison actually made 2 Days in Paris stand out to me as a more original film.

It’s fair to make comparisons. 2 Days in Paris, like Before Sunset, is a snap shot of relationship between a French woman and an American man, which plays out over the course of a temporary stay Paris. Both films even end with images of Delpy dancing. But whereas the last scene of Sunset (in which Delpy’s Celine channels the spirit of Nina Simone while Ethan Hawke’s Jesse looks on, boggled by her beauty and her shaking booty) typifies that film’s idealization of that relationship, Paris has little use for such golden-hued fantasies of romantic love.

Linklater’s film is a verite-style portrait of a relationship at its most magical (and least sustainable); Delpy’s is an almost Brechtian analysis of what happens to a relationship after that magic hour. It’s far from a perfect film, and in fact at times it feels rather schizophrenic. But somehow, in between fits of broad comedy and Godardian self-referentiality (the first shot of the film even offers a wink at Godard’s “girl and a gun”), Delpy manages to pull off a spot-on portrayal of what it feels like to be in an adult relationship on the brink. It’s certainly messier than Linklater’s tightly-orchestrated symphony of long shots, but to me, the fact you can all but see Delpy’s fingerprints on the screen is extremely appealing.

It’s also fascinating to watch Delpy directly allude to Sunset, as she seems to be doing in the final of scene of Paris, but recast the mood and the situation to fit her own point of view. In Sunset, Linklater draws attention to Delpy’s pale, etheral beauty and sylph-like thinness by putting the actress in a gauzy, backless black blouse, and shooting her slinky dance for Jesse in wide-angle. Celine is clearly performing, but with her body perpendicular to Jesse’s, so that we get the sense that he’s almost spying on her in plain sight. This is classic female objectification–there’s even something slightly creepy about the second-to-last shot of the film, when Hawke, right before breaking into laughter, seems to shift his gaze into a leer. The final shots of 2 Days in Paris have an entirely different feel. I guess it would be a spoiler to go into it here in great detail, but suffice it to say that Delpy (seen here on screen clearly slightly heavier and slightly older, but no less beautiful) takes the opportunity to move away from the fantasy and towards the real.

Above: that final shot of Celine dancing in Before Sunset. You can also watch a brief clip from Paris here, courtesy of indieWIRE.

I stumbled across this story via the FILMMAKER Mag blog: in a lengthy story for the Contra Costa Times, Mary F. Pols talks to a number of female filmmakers, from super-indie to mega-Hollywood, about working in a business that is still overwhelmingly run by dudes. There’s a lot of good stuff in the piece, but an anecdote from actress/director Julie Delpy particularly caught my eye.

Delpy’s second feature film as writer/director, 2 Days in Paris, opens in the U.S. next month. Festival buzz has generally been positive, but no one who’s seen the thing can overlook the similarities between it and the film that marks Delpy’s greatest triumph as an actress, Richard Linklater’s Before Sunset. Well, turns out, there’s a reason for that. After working for some of world cinema’s greatest directors and attending NYU film school, Delpy “had a drawer full of scripts that reflected her love of science fiction and other nongirlie topics”–none of which she could find financing for. Then, as Pols tells it,

[A] friend suggested she write a script that bore some similarity to Before Sunset, the successful 2004 film Delpy had starred in and co-written. She had shared an Oscar nomination for the screenplay, and her friend’s supposition was that financiers would feel “safe” with a project that seemed like Before Sunset.
The trick paid off. Delpy wrote 40 pages of a relationship farce set in Paris, which she then shopped around. She found financing for it in Germany. The result is 2 Days in Paris. [...]
“This is why my first film is a romantic comedy,” said Delpy, now 37, with evident exasperation. “It is only because it is the first time people will give me money to make a film. People will trust a woman to do something with a relationship more than they will to do something with a war story or science fiction.”

Delpy goes on explain that she’d “sell out to direct a big action movie” in a heartbeat. Her lifelong dream, she says, is to make a film like Blade Runner. “But you need money to make Blade Runner.”

Ignoring, for a moment, that Delpy probably shouldn’t be whining about how the big boys won’t give her money to make a summer tentpole before her first real feature is even released, I’d be fascinated to see what kinds of scripts are lying dormant in other filmmakers’ drawers. Does Harmony Korine have a high school comedy that no one wants to pay for? Does Sofia Coppola secretly want to remake Raging Bull? And considering how many relatively nameless, style-less directors are handed “big action movies” these days, does demonstrable competence in a specific genre actually hurt more than it helps?