newjerseynewsroom.com

BY JOE TYRRELL

NEWJERSEYNEWSROOM.COM

MOVIE REVIEW

Julie Delpy infuses her acting with intelligence and beauty, but as a writer and director she also brings the wackiness.

Her new work, “2 Days in New York,” is a companionable follow-up to “2 Days in Paris” from 2007. Once again, Delpy demonstrates her willingness to load bits of her own life into the Cuisinart and press pulse.

A mixture of sharply comic cultural and familial clashes plus warm-hearted whimsy, the new movie firmly establishes Delpy’s place in the trans-Atlantic fey community, as a sort of love child of Woody Allen and Jane Birkin. She even finds a spot for Vincent Gallo.

Delpy’s greatest achievement may be her ability to persuade family and friends to participate in comedies of madcap manners. While skewering those closest to her, whether their stand-ins or their actual persons, Delpy presents her own character as an impeding bullet-train wreck, going a kilometer a minute toward a self-induced smash-up.

In the first movie, Delpy introduced Marion, a French photographer making a brief stopover in Paris to present her American boyfriend to her parents. Marion’s charming but batty parents were played by Delpy’s own parents, Marie Pillet and Albert Delpy.

For Marion’s boyfriend, Jack, Delpy recruited one of her exes, Adam Goldberg. He was generous enough to play Jack as the sort of asshole American who goes to another country without knowing a word of the language and is miffed when the locals keep speaking it. He's the sort of idiot boyfriend who visits his girl’s hometown and gets pissed when she runs into old lovers.

This time around, Jack is somewhere in the city but literally out of the picture. Marion is raising their 3-year-old son Lulu (Owen Shipman) with Mingus, nicely played by Chris Rock in real-person form. The host of a radio show and a contributor to the Village Voice, Mingus does get off the occasional one-liner to remind us of Rock’s day job.

“If you find someone who will do a funny show about Haiti, then go ahead and hire them because I’m not the guy,” he says during one phone conversation.

Rock is less successful riffing with a cardboard cut-out of Barack Obama, in which he comes across more as a star-struck fan than a sharp political observer.

Mingus also has a young daughter, Willow (Talen Riley) from one of his failed marriages, and he is worried because Marion’s family is about to invade their very small piece of lower Manhattan turf. Mingus and Marion share the kind of narrow, exposed-brick apartment suitable for urbanites in love, provided they get out a lot.

Unfortunately, Pillet died in 2009, which Delpy makes gentle use of in launching the new tale. But Albert Delpy returns as Marion’s pungent but twinkly dad Jeannot. So does Delpy’s friend Alexia Landeau, reprising her role as Marion’s sister Rose.

Delpy is an only child, but she and Landeau, who share the screenwriting credit, have established an all-too-realistic rapport as siblings whose fondness begins eroding about 30 seconds into any new encounter.

Tipping the balance to overload, Rose has unexpectedly brought along Manu (Alexandre Nahon), an old family friend now ostensibly her boyfriend, though he wants everyone to know that he was previously involved with Marion. “It was 100 years ago!” she protests to Mingus.

Thin to the point of skinniness, Landeau’s Rose nevertheless has difficulty staying within the confines of her clothing. Her public pop-outs mortify her sister, but at least some of her new acquaintances respond enthusiastically.

Although Jeannot eventually establishes connections, at least one drawn from Albert Delpy’s own life, he initially comes across as a salacious, sausage smuggler, encompassing all definitions of sausage.

All the little frictions create sparks at table, where in a suavely written bilingual babble, Marion and Rose steadily escalate from mild critique to physical attack, Mingus and his sister Elizabeth (Malinda Williams) puzzle over conversing with Jeannot, while Manu alternates between overly familiar remarks in English and mistranslations into French.

Meanwhile, Mingus is perturbed that every time Rose and Manu pronounce his name, “Ming-goose,” they struggle to suppress chuckles. There’s a lot going on, not the least an affectionate send-up of French enthusiasm for American culture, genuine if often wrong-headed.

“You’re so lucky to be black,” Manu wistfully tells Mingus. “That’s my one regret.”

Not all such episodes resonate later in the movie, but one that does pay off occurs when Manu invites a dealer to the apartment to buy grass in front of everyone. The hasty explanation offered the children is that it is “grass from Central Park” to take home as a souvenir.

But Delpy and Landeau have other targets, including the increasingly frazzled Marion’s efforts to get ahead professionally. With an exhibition of her photos coming up, she and her gallery owner come up with a novel bit of hype. Besides her photos, Marion will sell her soul.

“America is so cool!” Rose exclaims. “Can I sell my soul, too?”

“It’s a conceptual piece,” Marion replies.

“The fee, is that also conceptual?” Rose asks.

Their script is as interested in the sudden enthusiasms and underlying affections that unite these characters as it is in the minor differences that they inflate into avoidable crises. Unlike many movie projects, “2 Days in New York” is one where all involved escape with their souls intact.

Joe Tyrrell may be reached at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it or followed on Twitter @ jtyrrell87.