2 Days in New York

A sequel to 2 Days in Paris, but you don’t have to have seen the first one to enjoy this one. That’s because in the first, Julie Delpy and Adam Goldberg are a couple, but it’s falling apart. In this one, he’s history, and she is in a new relationship with Chris Rock. They have a young boy child (which is not his) and he gets visits from an older girl child from a previous marriage. And her father (played by Julie’s real father, Albert) and sister and the sister’s asshole boyfriend come over from Paris for a visit. Chris seems to understand a little bit of French, if you speak slowly, but doesn’t speak it. Papa speaks almost no English. The sister and the boyfriend speak English, but everything out of his mouth is idiotic and everything she says sparks an argument—which sometimes come to actual blows—with Julie. The two have, as they say, issues.

I found it all annoying at first, much to my dismay, because I love and enormously respect Julie Delpy, who is not only a terrific actress but a writer, a singer, a songwriter, and in the original film she produced, directed, edited, wrote the music … just about everything but run the craft services truck, passing out fruit and sandwiches and Evian water. But she’s better at a more gentle style of comedy than this. Here, we have a lot of people I didn’t like very much (basically, all the ones who came over from France to sneer at everything American) shouting over each other.

Comedies that aren’t working tend to get worse as they go along, or at least that’s my experience. Oddly, I liked this one better after the halfway point, when things settled down a bit and got both more honest and funnier. I felt like Julie was trying too hard for laughs at first, writing characters that were too obviously comic stereotypes. Once the boyfriend was deported back to Frogland for lighting up a joint in front of a police station, things got a lot better. Not up to Delpy’s masterpieces of Before Sunrise, Before Sunset, and Before Midnight, but worth seeing.