No doubt some Americans, if they think about the French at all, entertain vague notions that our ostensible friends across the Atlantic are hygiene-challenged, eat strange, smelly food and like to walk around naked.
Here comes French actress and filmmaker Julie Delpy with a culture-clash comedy in which her character’s hygiene-challenged father tries to smuggle strange, smelly food past customs, and her sister walks around the apartment naked.
Jokes this obvious shouldn’t work at all, yet from time to time they do in “2 Days in New York” a sequel to Delpy’s “2 Days in Paris” with a new love interest.
Marion (Delpy) is a photographer living with Mingus (Chris Rock) and their children from earlier relationships. Marion is two days from the biggest gallery opening of her life, and, of course, it’s now that her father (Albert Delpy, the director’s real-life dad) and sister Rose (Delpy’s co-screenwriter Alexia Landeau) arrive for a visit.
The inevitable catastrophe is magnified by Rose’s boyfriend, Manu (a brilliantly skeezy, clueless Alex Nahon), who’s in New York basically to score weed and marvel at African-Americans and their gritty urban ways.
When he remarks that he’d make a great black person, Rock’s expression seems to mingle stupefied disbelief with speculation about how hard one would have to hit this idiot to knock some sense into him.
Marion loves her impossible family, but she’s also an artist, with an artist’s occasional selfishness. Like every other working mother, her ceaseless, ever-shifting responsibilities are nibbling her to death.
Delpy’s good at keeping Marion’s complaints sharp and funny, rather than wan and whiny. Even so, the movie’s a bumpy ride as her good farcical instincts vie with the yen for cheap laughs.
There’s a very funny bit in a restaurant where, in front of someone Mingus is trying to impress, Marion and Rose begin bickering and smacking each other to the tune of a minor education in vulgar French slang.
Even better is the scene when Marion, unable to cope with an art critic’s spectacularly passive-aggressive digs, becomes so unglued that she blurts, “Everybody hates you.”
Compared with moments like that, it’s a chore to encounter a close-up of a cat’s hairball or a baby urinating during a diaper change.
Then, too, the denouement is rushed and pat, all but bringing the characters onstage for a curtain call.
Woody Allen’s Manhattan-infused comedies are an obvious influence. Delpy definitely hasn’t reached the point where she can withstand that comparison, but the best moments here suggest she may yet get there.