2 Days in New York feels like a week in Jersey
Starring: Julie Delpy, Chris Rock Playing at: Forum, Excentris Parents’ guide: Coarse language, nudity, adult
themes, drug use In Julie Delpy’s cross-cultural comedy 2 Days in New York, a family of French people is stopped at the border trying to smuggle 10 sausages and eight cheeses into Manhattan. When dad finally gets through, he smells of sausage, but he doesn’t have a shower because he just had one yesterday, in Paris. Later, when his daughter takes him out to visit her favourite haunts, she says, “Dad, promise you won’t fart in my yoga class.”
Ooh la la! C’est une comédie américaine, and une clunky one at that.
Delpy is a charming talent who does things by twos: the romances Before Sunrise and Before Sunset, co-starring Ethan Hawke, were the bookends of a love-at-first-sight meeting and 2 Days in New York is a kind of sequel to 2 Days in Paris, which she also wrote and directed, and which was, keeping to the numerical theme, twice as good.
In the Paris movie, Delpy’s character, a slightly neurotic artist named Marion, is showing the city of her birth to her boyfriend, Jack (Adam Goldberg). As the new film begins, Jack and Marion have separated, and she is living in New York with mingus (chrisrock in a sympathetic, controlled performance). They each have children from a previous relationship, but they coexist in happy harmony in one of those hip, brick-walled apartments that signal upwardbound bohemia.
Then her relatives arrive: Papa (Albert Delpy, the star’s real-life father), a sort of Gal- lic Falstaff with so much joie de vivre you want to strangle him; Rose (co-writer Alexia Landau), Marion’s sexually unhinged sister, a woman who walks around naked and comes on to everything in pants; and the irritating Manu (Alexandre Nahon), Rose’s boyfriend and also Marion’s ex.
Manu disappears halfway into the plot, but by then it’s too late for such small mercies.
Where 2 Days in Paris was a comedy of manners, Delpy has gone for madcap this time.
Dad takes one look at the sleeping arrangements at Marion and Mingus’s apartment and says, “Where am I supposed to jerk off ?” Rose goes to that yoga class braless, and her breast pops out of her tank top. Manu confronts every black character with a sort of Euromoron stereotyping (“Do you like Salt-N-Pepa?” he asks Mingus, 20 years too late.)
They race from one catastrophe to the next with the speed of doors slamming in a Georges Faydeau play. Marion’s family is impossible: They smoke pot in the elevator, Papa runs his keys on the sides of parked cars (a quirk that seemed rebellious in the first film and comes off as mildly insane here), they fall on a box of chocolate croissants like movie cannibals devouring a fat man.
It’s grating, even as Delpy tries to find some truth in the rough-and-tumble of francophobia run amok. She casts herself as a woman tortured by mid-life doubts, but her character vacillates wildly between apology and tantrum, and a would-be satire on the New York art scene — Marion is selling off her soul for $10,000 as a performance piece — amounts to nothing but a chance for a bizarre cameo by an indie star most people would not recognize (he has to introduce himself).
Rock comes off the best, even though his talent for the outrageous riff is mostly wasted. Scenes where he shares his doubts with a cardboard cut-out of Barack Obama give hints of his energetic standup act, and some of his one-liners — he says Marion’s family is the reverse of Waiting for Godot because one of them is always around — give an occasional shot of comic subversion to the general freneticism.
Mostly, though, the comedy is along the lines of Mingus saying that Marion is “nice” and Papa asking if he said “neige.” Quel malentendu! It’s times like this that 2 Days in New York feels like a week in Jersey.