A French Actress’s Life on Screen. Kind Of.
PARIS
FOR half her life the 37-year-old French actress Julie Delpy has been trying to direct. There was the screenplay she wrote at 17 that captured the interest of a French publisher but never made it to the big screen. There were two shorts, including her self-financed experimental film in 2002, “Looking for Jimmy,” that she never found the backing to finish. And numerous other screenplays she’d write and show around but never seemed to get off the ground.
But while she wasn’t writing, there was acting: performances in 50 films, including her role as Celine in Richard Linklater’s 1995 cult film “Before Sunrise,” which she wrote with Mr. Linklater and her co-star, Ethan Hawke. Mr. Hawke and Ms. Delpy briefly reprised their roles in Mr. Linklater’s animated “Waking Life” in 2001, and the three received an Academy Award nomination in 2005 for writing “Before Sunset,” a sequel shot in Paris. It was that recognition, Ms. Delpy said, that helped her win financing for her first feature film, “2 Days in Paris,” opening Friday.
Like “Before Sunset,” “2 Days” is about a romance between a Frenchwoman and an American man. But while she was happy to hint at certain similarities as a way to get the movie made, she said it’s “totally different” from the Linklater films.
For starters “2 Days in Paris” is less romantic, more wicked and very personal. Ms. Delpy wrote, directed, edited, produced, composed music for it. She sings and stars in this irreverent comedy about Marion, a French photographer living in New York, and her American boyfriend, Jack, who decide to rekindle their two-year relationship with a trip to Venice, stopping off for 48 hours in Paris.
Ms. Delpy cast her own parents, the actors Albert Delpy and Marie Pillet, to play her on-screen parents. Her ex-boyfriend Adam Goldberg plays her character’s boyfriend. Even her real-life cat, Max, plays Marion’s pet, Jean-Luc. Scenes from the film were shot on the family compound in Paris where Ms. Delpy keeps a studio above her parents’ apartment.
So what is Ms. Delpy doing in a hotel in the bourgeois Seventh Arrondissement, the last place you’d expect the bohemian heroine of the film to haunt?
“I’m not bourgeois at all, and my family doesn’t live in the Seventh,” Ms. Delpy said. She looked like a 21st-century Alice in Wonderland, dressed up in a ruffled, powder-blue lace dress, wearing teal-colored patent leather ankle boots with black tights on a June afternoon, her blond angel hair whisked into a tiny bun.
Ms. Delpy is an only child who grew up in Paris hanging out backstage with her parents, who began taking her to the movies at the age of 2. “We couldn’t afford a baby sitter,” Mr. Delpy said over coffee on the terrace of Le Select. “She saw all of Godard, American cartoons, popular French comedies. I think it’s good she had all those influences. You can see it in her work.”
In addition to acting, young Julie danced, played the clarinet and took weekly language lessons over tea with “real English ladies,” said Ms. Pillet, who recalled that one high school teacher tried have her expelled for “too much artistic activity outside of school.” Another suggested the outspoken girl needed psychoanalysis. “We were against that,” Mr. Delpy said. “Luckily she wasn’t psychoanalyzed, or she would never have gone into this business.”
By the time Ms. Delpy went to the New York University Film School in 1989, she had been directed by Jean-Luc Godard and Bertrand Tavernier and been nominated for a César award, the French Oscar, for best newcomer at the age of 17. But she had also broken a film industry taboo by revealing that a middle-aged director had tried to force her onto the casting couch as a teenager. “It’s cost me my career in France to say what I think,” she said.
She moved to Los Angeles in 1993 and has worked mostly in the United States since.
Ms. Delpy’s film depicts a sensual, live-and-let-live Paris, with Jack as your classic American fish out of water: stranded without language, paranoid about hygiene, disgusted by the rabbit Marion’s father stews for lunch, threatened by an endless stream of her ex-lovers. Yet he is also the kind of American you’d think would feel right at home in Paris. Early in the film he gives false directions to a pack of his countrymen wearing Bush-Cheney T-shirts.
“He’s an American who overidealizes Paris as a sort of idyllic political and cultural mecca,” Mr. Goldberg said by phone. “And this American who is not a jingoist or a fan of George Bush finds himself becoming more and more American the longer he’s there. That character is like a really thinly veiled version of me. Anybody who knows me knows that I’m like a raging hypochondriac neurotic freak.”
But Ms. Delpy said she based the character of Jack on her own experiences.
“When I come back to Paris, the first few weeks I’m in shock at how people elbow you in the Métro and nobody smiles,” she said. “And then because I am a born Parisian, I go back to kicking cars that don’t stop at the crosswalk. Once you get to know the French, they can be very friendly. But the first impression is really hard for Jack. It seems to him that everyone’s rude, obsessed with sex — and obviously I focused on that to feed his paranoia.”
In a conversation with Jack, one of Marion’s male admirers uses sex as a metaphor for the American fondness for “entering hostile territories.” A jealous spat between Jack and Marion turns into a reflection on the ramifications of oral sex on modern American democracy, something Ms. Delpy said would never happen in France.
“There’s a lot of things I like about America,” she said. “That puritanism, I don’t like.”
But the film also takes aim at France, and Ms. Delpy said that she had a hard time finding French financing, later fighting the French distributor to keep two scenes, one involving a racist French taxi driver and another a Parisian ex-boyfriend who moved to Asia to sleep with under-age girls.
“It’s only because the film went to Berlin, was well received and sold to many countries that they were like, ‘O.K., we can’t re-edit the film for France,’ ” she said. “France doesn’t have a very easy time with self-criticism, especially from someone who lives overseas half the time.”
In France Ms. Delpy is both admired for her talent and resented for having moved to Hollywood. But the film received positive reviews when it opened here July 11 and was second to “Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix” at the box office. Several critics even compared her to Woody Allen.
Ms. Delpy’s closest collaborators say her directing debut is no surprise.
“My whole relationship with Julie has always been like talking to a fellow filmmaker,” Mr. Linklater said by telephone from Texas. “Julie Delpy making a feature film is just a logical and completely natural extension of what she’s been doing with her whole life.”
Mr. Hawke, in a telephone interview from Los Angeles, said he’d been listening to Ms. Delpy’s movie ideas for years. “Eventually, with somebody who has as many ideas per minute as Julie, you’re not going to be happy sitting in your apartment reading Vogue waiting for somebody to hand you a good part.”
Mr. Goldberg (“Saving Private Ryan”) agreed to do the film before seeing the script. “I used to read scripts of hers, and it always seemed nuts to me that she wasn’t directing,” he said. “I thought we had a very strange and funny dynamic, and I definitely liked the idea of at least attempting to put that on film. Working with Julie was very simple and easy and natural, but a bit surreal. I could definitely see where it would be confusing whether I was the character or not, and I myself wasn’t entirely sure.”
Some of the film’s most hilarious scenes involve Jack’s being teased in a language he doesn’t understand. “He’s a very funny actor, and the more sad and tortured he looks, the funnier he is,” Ms. Delpy said, adding that she didn’t translate the French dialogue for Mr. Goldberg. “He hated Paris. I mean, I think he’s a Method actor. Let’s say that he was so Method that he hated France and every French person except my parents. He got along so well with my father, I almost had to keep them apart.”
“2 Days in Paris” is as much about the differences between human beings as between cultures. But its ending is a hopeful, post-romantic pantomime study of what holds people together.
“Meeting someone you love is so rare,” Ms. Delpy said, “and finding someone you can communicate with — even if sometimes it’s uncomfortable — that you have to make an effort to make it work. I personally have had a life of going from one man to another, and I just don’t want to do that anymore. So this film is — well, my friend called it ‘The Last Temptation of Julie.’ ”
Ms. Delpy may have stopped looking for the next man, but her heart is set on directing her next film project, “The Countess,” a costume drama based on fact about a murderous 17th-century Hungarian countess. “It took years for people to trust me to be capable of making a film,” Ms. Delpy said. But she knows the risks, invoking an ill-fated Terry Gilliam opus. “It’s all set, but you never know. You can have the money in place, a full cast — then ‘Lost in La Mancha’ happens.”
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